The Broken Circle
by Miashara
Summary: Exalted And things had begun so well
1. Prologue

The Broken Circle

In the Forbidden City of Jaggerfall, upon a tower of glass and onyx I sat to plot revenge. Ever since Ash Maiden had died, I had haunted the black metropolis, watching the prismatic arrangement of lights pour down through empty turrets to the silent streets. Meditating on the koans to control the seething anger had failed me finally, forcing me to violent physical exertion in the forms until my arms felt like lead and my technique had degraded to sloppy movements my sensei would have beaten me for, were he still alive. Still I had continued from dawn and through to the next night, practicing the first movements. While peace proved elusive, clarity came to me in time through the direct, linear motions that predicated mastery and I realized that seeking to understand was impossible. The murder was inscrutable as a koan, but possessed no interior hidden meaning. It was simply a motive to do what must be done. Reconciling myself to revenge, I concluded that I must figure out the perfect way to do so, Then exhaustion overcame me, and I rested while my mind took up effort where my body stopped.

Willows grew in the river valley outside Jaggerfall's unbroken walls, crested like boiling clouds so thick they obscured the wet marshland. Walls and towers stood above the white fog giving the city the appearance of floating in the sky. On the highest tower I was deep in the sky, alone with stars and comets. It was fitting. Mars stood in the house of the Crow as it had when I was born. That to was fitting. Mars meant war, and the Crow meant death. Bad death, of the kind that left vengeful ghosts, followed in the shadow of the Crow. But now I was unsure if it stood for what had already occurred, or what would come after.

While I schemed footsteps echoed up from the cavernous staircase to the tower's lower levels. Someone was making a lot of noise, making too much of it for someone simply careless or untrained. I waited calmly because my muscles had no energy left to twitch while mentally I did somersaults. It took a long time for a head to appear.

Brilliant Void emerged eventually. His bald head emerged from the darkness first. It was neither handsome nor ugly, with no single feature that marred his looks, but no elegance of jaw or brow to attract the eye. There was more black hair in his eyebrows then anywhere else on his body. That stayed out of starlight for a while, as he regarded me, our environs, and then the night sky. I was very careful to keep my hands in plain sight, resting them in a beam of moonlight. Our tableau was uninterrupted by any outside force, and in time Brilliant Void emerged completely.

He was a big man whose eyes were on level with the top of my head. Instead of having a neck, his head was the fugitive victim of his hungry shoulders, who were attempting to envelope it completely. Each of his shoulders was wider than my chest with arms that had originally been tree trunks.

His own trunk and legs were proportionately vast, and every inch of his skin was gnarled muscle. I rose once he stood on the rooftop with me and showed due respect.

"You've been a hard man to find," he observed.

"One does not come to Jaggerfall if one wants to be found," I answered.

"One should not come to Jaggerfall at all," he replied.

"Well, I came," I told him simply.

Walking forward, he stopped at the center of the oval turret and stared down. Stepping into a footprint left in sweat, he followed with another footstep that dropped easily into a horse stance. Step by step he followed the pattern on the ground, making strikes where they were obvious from the footwork. I watched and lamented, for he followed the pattern better then I had laid it. At one point he stopped and considered the next movement carefully, finally placing his right heel a hair further forward then I had. Then he stood and left the center of the ring, coming to stand before me.

"We are burying her at dawn," he told me. "Her ashes lie in a silver urn in the Chapel of Six Gods. You must come. Her family will want to see you."

"No," I said simply. "She may be dead, but I won't recognize it. I won't watch her white urn put into the ground where she should have stood in white when she married."

"It is not for you that her funeral takes place," Brilliant Void replied.

"And it is not for her ghost! She won't rest simply because she's trapped underground with the worms!"

"Funerals are not for the departed. They are for the living, that those who remain may loosen their hold on her as she goes. But grief can kill, and you must share it with her mother and her father, that they do not carry the burden alone," he chided me.

I looked up into his eyes. They were soft and kind, and ignored the hard bitterness of mine.

"I won't," I denied.

"You will. Not because you want to, but because you must. If you loved her, you know she would want you to support her family."

That hit me viciously, knocking the wind from my lungs and leaving me gasping on hurt and grief. I bent almost double, loosing sight of the ground in the haze.

"Bastard," I told him.

"You sit here selfishly while her family cries alone, you would turn your back on them in the moment of their most poignant grief, and you cry foul when I remind you of the truth of the matter? Your master would be ashamed."

As always, Brilliant Void struck every vulnerable point necessary to leave me gasping on the ground. Without even raising his fists, he left me beaten as he departed into the gloom of the stairs.


	2. Chapter 1

The Broken Circle

Act 1

There is an odd fate that watches over funerals in the Valley of Nine. It assures that the weather will rain, but soon after the sun will beat down with renewed vigor. There's something cathartic in the sun emerging from a torrential rain. But before the sun rose after Ash Maiden was laid to rest, the rain clouds were trapped between the towering mountains and dumped endless tears from heaven. In time the family left, and retreated to their homes to cry privately. One by one the friends departed as well, until when the sun set behind thick clouds, the church yard was empty.

We emerged like phantoms from the veil of rain. One by one figures walked out of the darkness to stand around the freshly turned earth before a marble gravestone. There were four, three men, one woman, who appeared. All had been at the funeral earlier and escorted the grieving family home. Once ensconced in familiar places with familiar things, they had departed for their own homes, but unerringly they'd been drawn back to the burial site. Now they watched the rain make mud out of the earth.

"She should have been buried in wood," spoke the gravelly voice of one. "She would have liked that."

"She would have," agreed the woman. Her voice was much softer than the other.

"Isn't it odd how the names of Bright Leaf come true in such simple ways?" asked a second man. His voice was smoother than his compatriot's. Unlike everyone else who wore pure white robes of mourning, his cloak was sky blue. In the rain they all looked gray anyway. "We thought she was named for her fairness, or the trees under which she liked to walk. But Ash Maiden came true in such a simple way I never saw it coming."

"You couldn't have, Dog," replied the woman, shortening his name out of familiarity. "This was not foreseen. It could not have been."

"Couldn't it? I wonder sometimes. Maybe had we looked a bit-"

"Stop," snapped the man who'd thought the silver urn had been a poor choice. "Shut up right now, and don't ever think that again."

"Easy now, Hail. Please, not like that. Not so soon," asked the woman quietly.

"Clockwork Dog knows what I mean," the one called Hail responded, his tone no longer ruthless. "But that way lies madness."

"Yes, yes. You're right," admitted Dog. "I know. But I can't see very much at all now. I can't see how this could have happened, and I can't see what we must do now that it has."

"That's simple," I replied quietly. I wasn't very good at speaking quietly, but I tried out of respect. "We find out whom, and then we kill him."

Dog and Hail looked at the ground, while the woman looked up at me. Her eyes were questioning. "For revenge? Or for Ash Maiden?"

"Either. Both. Does it matter?" I responded.

"No. Not really," Angel admitted. "So my question becomes, how far do you intend to take this? Since nothing you do will bring her back, do you simply desire to do bad things to bad people in her name? Would you make Ash Maiden's memory one of violence?""

"Yes," I replied immediately, without needing to consider it. "I'll wrap the world in a burial shroud, turn the seas red with blood, and unleash horror that tears screaming across the night sky if I have to. I'm going to find her killer, kill him, and wait a thousand years until he returns in his next incarnation so I can kill him again, and again, and again. I don't care about good or bad or the damn rituals that Bright Leaf claims sent her to peace. The entire Immaculate Dogma be damned. I'm killing that maggot if I have to drown him in my spite."

"No, you won't," Angel flatly contradicted me. "But we will find the person responsible, and we will kill them. But it will end there."

I stared back at her, but knew I couldn't beat her in a battle of wills. "Fine. So long as we kill them."

"That was never in question," she responded. "It was only the methods."

"Dog, say something," Hail told him. "Make them see they're being stupid."

"I can't," Dog replied. "That is the one thing that stands clear to me. Oh, I spin arguments and show them the way they're going leads to nothing. But as soon as we split, it will come to nothing, for in the mind of him," and Dog indicated me. "Is a madness. All balance has been thrown clear, and while Fall of Angels is still rational, should I dissuade her from accompanying him, The Ending shall wreak such a horror upon Creation that evil will have entry to the Paths of Heaven. There are two ways to stop him, and Fall of Angels going with him is one. I refuse to even consider the other. Thus Hail, it seems I must climb aboard this departing ship and pray my strength on the tiller prevents it from crashing on the shoals." He stepped forward and pivoted, a symbolic gesture that put him beside me and Angel.

Hail saw how the circle had shifted to become a line with him as the sole outlier. In some deep part of my heart I felt terrible, for Hail was as consumed with his own grief as we were. His smooth manners had given way to coarse pronouncements, meaning that the raw pain under the surface was corroding his grace. Yet he stood on the path he saw as right and refused to step off it, even in his personal trial.

"I won't be a party to this," he said finally and walked away.

I opened my mouth to shout something at him. Angel stopped me by smashing her fist into the side of my head hard enough that I toppled to the wet earth and saw lights and colors. She stood over me with an implacable expression. "You were about to say something stupid," she told me.

"What?" I yelled at her. "I was going to tell Hail-"

"Something stupid that he doesn't need to hear." She crouched down so her face was only a foot from mine. Rain poured off her features and dripped to the ground, ignored. "Listen to me. That man is a better person than we are. He's doing the right thing in his heart while he's half mad with grief, and it's tearing him from the friends who are his family. He's in agony right now, and he's bearing it alone because the people who should be helping him are about to go kill someone. But he won't bend because his heart tells him what's right, and he listens to it before us, which is why we should listen to him. But you won't say anything that confuses or muddles his world, nor will you make his burden any heavier. He's a better person then we are, and you won't make him suffer for it."

I looked from her to Dog. He shrugged. "She's coming along to make sure you don't do anything stupid. Now she isn't letting you do anything stupid. I'd listen to her."

"I thought you came along because you wanted to avenge Ash Maiden's death, and find her killer?" I asked. The side of my head was beginning to throb, and I began to realize how hard Angel had hit me.

"Two birds, one stone," she replied. "Make no mistake, and never entertain the idea that I am not committed to this goal like the wind is committed to blow. But we do this right, or I'll leave you bound to a tree while I find and kill the murderer without you. Do you understand me?"

I told you I couldn't beat Angel in a battle of wills. She was small and cute; her body looked soft to the touch and her hands were warm. Inside her was more iron than the mountains of the East. "Very well," I conceded.

"Good. Glad we have that settled." She reached down, picked me up, set me on my feet, and brushed the mud off my back. "Put a cold compress on that, or it will swell. And stop poking it."

"I love you," blurted Invisible Dog.

"What?" asked Angel, for she hadn't been paying attention. She was a woman of iron, but she'd taken one too many blows to the helmet and was also deaf.

"I said, 'let's get out of the rain,'" Dog lied.

"Good plan. My family's barn? It's warm, and we can figure out our next move," she suggested.

We agreed, and set off. Once we were at the barn, she left to get food and drink from inside. I turned to Dog, "Let's get out of the rain?" I asked amused. "That was the best you could come up with?"

"Shut up," he replied. Then he stood in the corner insulting himself.

We set out for Nibeldamt later that evening. There was a lot of quarreling first, but eventually I told them this was my insane mission for revenge so we were doing it my way. Instead of reducing the quarreling, this amplified it, but we still left for Nibeldamt. Across nine miles of mountain road that had carried mule trains to the iron mines of deserted Jaggerfall we ran until dawn when it had been two full days since I slept. The Unconquered Sun rose to find us trotting downhill. Light poured through the mountains and reflected off the thin dusting of snow that lay at the roots of the thin grass. A few clouds wafted by but the air was too cold to sustain them. We ran until nightfall and finally collapsed in a pile underneath huge pine trees. At dawn we started again and in time came to the gray city underneath a cloud of smoke.

In the absence of a major smelting center in the mountains of Duun Nibeldamt grew from a not two-shits village to a collection of smelters on the Meander River. Nearly seven thousand people huddled under an umbrella of dirty soot. They had repaired a First Age foundry as best they could. Now metal pumped out the door and ash into the air. It got into the dirt and turned it black. People still came, because there was money in iron that cared little for the varieties of the market. There was always war, and so long as there was war, there would be steel. By a looming black smithy of filthy granite sat a line of townhouses. In one of them lived family of Ash Maiden's who had brought her body back to Highmere. The wife had stayed for the funeral. The father couldn't. We met him at his door, looking like death.

There's only so much room for conversation with a group like ours. We didn't say anything as he escorted us to his kitchen and sat us around the table. He offered beer and food. We declined politely, hunched over in our seats, waiting. Anvil was his name, like his father before him, and like his only son.

"I suppose you could only be here for one reason," he observed while studying our trio.

"Just one," I replied. Now my voice was soft, but it was the softness of terrible strain.

"When I was coming home from work, my nephew Wide Eyes met me at my door. He's a little guy, doesn't even have his true name yet. He said his Momma had to talk to me. He said it couldn't wait. When I got there, she was in the house, but the kids weren't allowed in. She met me at the door. The body was on the table.

"She said Ash Maiden had been found floating in the river. She might have been drowned, I don't really know. There was water in her mouth, and river sludge under her fingernails. Some people who had been fishing on a dock pulled her out. One of them recognized her. They took her to my sister's house, and I came by later. A couple days later one of the mining caravans went up to the mountains, and they said they'd stop at Highmere. I had to stay here because the coke isn't burning right, but sent my wife and my kids, so they could take my niece home."

"She didn't drown," interjected Dog, his voice just as quiet as mine. "We saw the body before she was cremated. There were finger bruises on her throat. She was strangled."

Anvil looked up at him. "You couldn't have seen the body for days. She would have started to-"

"If he says they were finger bruises, they were," Angel flatly contradicted what Anvil wanted to say. The big foundry man looked strangely at the small woman who seemed little more than a girl. Her body was hidden by the white cloak of mourning, showing no adult development, and she had always had a young face. But now the cloak was dirt speckled, and her eyes were dark and grim. When she said that Clockwork Dog would never make a mistake, even analyzing a body that had begun to turn, the iron in her voice underlied her words like a steel frame. Anvil's words were like fruitless summer breezes against her certainty.

"Now," I said and leaned forward over the table. With an effort I placed my hands still on the oak planks between us, but they were rigidly still like petrified animals. "Who would have had reason to kill her?"

Anvil was hiding something. He looked at us three furies, consumed as we were with our desire for murderous revenge, and knew that we would start something he did not want done. Written in his eyes were the desires for us to go away and not make waves. But just as clearly he understood the inviolate will of Angel, the determination to see this through in Dog, and the near breaking madness born of my own grief. Worst of all for him, we were reading him even as he was reading us, and he knew it. As much as he wanted to hide what he knew, he understood that our madness could turn dangerous to Ash Maiden's family very quickly.

"She had been seen a lot with a northman called Frozen Thane. The foreman at the foundry has been looking for Frozen Thane, claims the ice walker stole money from him. It's a guy named Firm Grip. He's a big guy, and doesn't worry too much about the rules of law or the faith. There aren't be many things he wouldn't do if his boss told him to get some money back," Anvil explained,

""Did you tell him anything?" asked Dog. "About Ash Maiden or Frozen Thane?"

"There was nothing I knew to tell him. She stayed with my sister on the east side. Anyone could have told her that. I don't know where this northman stays, or what's happened to him. There haven't been any more bodies floating in the river, if that's what you're asking."

"No, we're asking if you told Firm Grip where he could find Ash Maiden, so he could ask her where Frozen Thane is. And if you did, then we shall find out about it, and visit the cost of your indiscretion upon you," I explained to him. "But if you honored the rules of family loyalty, then we have no fear that you kept your silence, and we thank you for your help."

"Where's Firm Grip?" asked Angel.

Anvil was staring at me, appalled by my veiled yet clear threat to kill him. He didn't turn to look at her when answering, "He works nights. He should be at the foundry now."

"Then we'll be leaving now. Thank you for the hospitality, Anvil, son of Anvil." Angel rose, and put a hand on my shoulder. I was staring into Anvil's eyes, looking for some hint of indiscretion. I wanted very badly to find it, but my comrades tugged at my shoulders, pulling me towards a more deserving victim of my attention. Reluctantly I gave way to them, and the three of us departed.

"You aren't after revenge," called Anvil, as he watched us leave from his stoop. "You're after madness."

"We're after something much worse than that," muttered Dog. "We're chasing the reason for madness."

I ignored him, and Angel probably had never heard at all. Soon we stood before the mammoth building, a functional relic of a past age. Plumes bore the smoke away above it, and a hundred windows glowed with red light. The foundry ran day and night. It had been made in the First Age, when the mad Solars had required metal for their armies. After the great cataclysms that ended that era, men still needed steel of superlative quality, and they ventured into the dark foundry and found ways to get it running again. Now the doorways shone with the light of molten iron, and heat poured from it like a physical force. The night shift was gathering outside, not yet ready to go in, while the day shift hadn't quite left. Smoke was turning our white clothes black while we watched. Soon we couldn't be told from the workers. A side door let us in to find a bored sweeper, who pointed out Firm Grip's office. We let ourselves in without knocking.

Firm Grip was another big man. He had big arms and a big gut that seemed to be chewing on the desk its owner was bent over. Dressed in a leather smock with hood, the foreman sweated profusely in the darkness. Beads of it ran off his face and plopped onto the paperwork he was studying. Great noises emanated from the innards of the smelting equipment, titanic smashing sounds and grinding noises. We studied him for a while before he even noticed we were there. Dirt and grime was worked well into his apron, and his seat was outlined on the floor in soot.

"Who're you lot?" he grunted when he noticed us. His face was fat and droopy. It looked like it was melting. Maybe he hadn't shaved and maybe his dark jaw line was simply coated in ash, but sweat beaded up on his chin. I decided I didn't like him.

"We're friends of Ash Maiden," Angel told him. "We heard you were looking for her before she died."

"The dead one? What of it?" he asked.

"Yes, the dead one," I told him. "Why were you looking for her?"

"Who sent you? What's the dead girl have to do with me?"

"That is the question," I observed. "We want to know when you saw her last, what happened when you did."

"Get out, now, or I'll throw you out."

I was about to explain to him the order in which I intended to break his fingers, when Dog cut me off. "Have you been having problems getting your coke burn right? Same fuel, same air, but the burn isn't as hot?" he asked.

Firm Grip made a weird face before saying, "Yeah. And?"

"Your intake shafts are jammed. Let them cool down, send a couple guys up there with spikes to purge the flues. Also, I noticed outside that your furnace hinges are building up gunk. If you clean that, you can pour the metal when it's hotter."

The foreman rolled his eyes from right to left across the three of us. They stopped on Clockwork Dog.

"Check your equipment. We'll be back tomorrow," Clockwork Dog finished. "Tell us what we need to know then. Tell us everything you know about Ash Maiden. Do that, and I'll tell you what's really wrong with your coke burn."

"I don't know anything about the dead girl," he grunted.

"Maybe ten percent of your coke costs will remind you. You must be wasting that much or more trying to get the fire hot enough. Think about it. And check the flues. They're filthy." With that Dog rose and gestured us to the door with a nod of his head. We fell in behind him and left.

"What's wrong with his coke burn?" Angel asked, as we trooped down a steep stairwell.

"I have no idea," Dog admitted. "Do you care?" he added curiously.

"No," she admitted.

"Then the flues?" I asked.

"Did that man look like he's obsessed with cleanliness?" Dog replied. "I'd bet my next meal he hasn't cleaned his flues on time. The hinges I noticed when we came in."

"Then explain why Firm Grip is going to tell us anything tomorrow," I told him.

Clockwork Dog sighed. "Firm Grip isn't going to tell us anything. But he wasn't going to tell us anything anyway. As soon as his shift gets off, he's going to go running to whoever tells him what to do, and tell him that we were asking about Ash Maiden. We sleep now and follow him in the morning. Then we find out who's giving the orders, and skip a bunch of meaningless violence."

"How do you-" Angel started.

"Because Firm Grip's an idiot. He's a follower, a sheep. He doesn't wipe himself without orders. Someone, whoever thought Frozen Thane owed him money, told him to go get it, and he did. But he didn't kill her," Dog added. "His hands are way too big."

Angel and I exchanged glances. In unison we shrugged. "Now, someone go get some food. We're going to sleep in that lumber yard," Dog told us as we left the side door we'd come in. It was directly before the main entrance to the foundry, and full of heaps of wood. Also piled high were mounds of charcoal bricks. They were the coke the foundry used. Angel ran off to acquire food, while we squatted in the shadows. "You take first watch," Dog concluded, and wrapped himself in his cloak to sleep.

"Why-"

"Because you're going to stay up and obsess anyway," he replied.

I stared at the back of his head, mouth open, searching for words. Eventually I remembered to shut my jaw, and positioned myself so I had a good view. In time Angel returned with bread and a water skin, and we consumed much of that. Then she curled up and went to sleep as well. I gazed into the foundry and watched men pour liquid metal, pounded from ore. I thought of the way sunlight looked went it went through long fair hair. Smiles would come so easily to some lips that they seemed poised to relax into a grin. She'd had such striking eyes. In time Dog woke so I could get some rest from our exertions. I stayed awake with him as long as I could, but eventually succumbed. Even then I slept but little. Waking up was worse.

"The shift's changing," Angel told me.

"Where's Dog?"

"Looking at a coke pile. I was about to wake him when he bolted upright and started babbling something. I think he actually did figure out what was wrong with the burn."

"He needs to focus on what's important," I grumbled.

Angel looked at me oddly before turning her attention to the foundry. We waited and watched, while the workers changed. Eventually Firm Grip appeared, still wearing his leather smock, and hurried away from the smithy. After finding Clockwork Dog, we lit from rooftop to rooftop and haunted the alleyways as we scurried after him. He didn't look around, and it was easy to stay concealed in the all pervading gloom.

In time we followed him to a mansion on the outskirts of the town. Upwind of the perpetual gales which whipped down off the highlands the air was clean, and the sun shared the sky with clouds and birds. Meadow larks sang in the trees that marched in stately file across the manicured gardens. Firm Grip stood out like a dirt stain on the sky as he entered the vast doors inlaid with sapphires. The entire mansion was of marble and done with blue highlights. Most amazing of all, waterfalls poured from alcoves in the walls, and ran into carefully orchestrated channels that twisted about the magnificent property. The entire thing stank of wealth.

"I don't see any guard," I said as we crouched behind a stone wall several hundred yards away. "No, wait, there they are. Two on the walls, three on the patio, one by the doors."

"The one by the door isn't a guard. He's a butler," Angel informed me.

"How do you know?" Dog asked.

"He's butling."

We both looked at her with the same expression. She matched our look. "What? I used to have a butler. Before the wars and I came to Highmere."

Dog and I exchanged a glance. By common agreement, we never asked anyone in the group about their past. Still, Angel could hack her way through the forest with only a knife and sever tree limbs bigger than her waist with that same knife. I couldn't imagine her being waited on by anyone, nor requiring butling.

"Well, anyway, how do we sneak inside?" I asked.

"We don't," Dog told me. "That's a Dynast. The crest on the door is Ragara, and the second one is Peleps."

"And?" I asked again.

"Those are Dynasts," Dog repeated, looking at me like he expected that to mean something. "From the Realm? The Blessed Isle?"

"I know what a Dynast is," I retorted. "But I see no reason not to go in there. You were the one who said where ever Firm Grip went is where we can find some answers. He came here, and we know he doesn't live here. So inside that house are answers."

"You're not listening. That's probably the man who runs the foundry. The foundry is from the First Age, which means that it needs magic to run, which means the man who really runs it isn't a man. And if it's a Dynast, that means it's an immortal, one of the Chosen of the Dragons."

"And?" I kept repeating.

"That's an Exalted. One of the Chosen. He's a bigger badass then all of us combined, and he may have a wife who could probably beat Angel senseless with her dining fork. We're mortals. They aren't. We don't go smashing around, breaking stuff. He'll kill you, and then your revenge won't happen."

I considered his point. "Think you can take a Dynast?" I asked Angel.

"Of course not," she replied.

"Want to anyway?"

"Till death, baby," she replied.

"That's my girl. You hit right, I'll go left?" I asked.

"Good deal. Go on my signal," she replied, and took off running, still crouching behind the low wall.

Clockwork Dog stared at me. "Why did she call you baby? Are you and-"

"Don't be an ass. Now let's go break into to a mansion. Besides, if you impress her, she might call you baby to," I told him, and lead him around the side of the house, staying low and keeping to the new dawn shadows. "Ready to hit this guy?" I asked Dog when we were in position.

"Terrestrial," he corrected me. "And no, but that certainly won't do any good now."

"I thought you said it was a Dynast?" I asked him.

"It is. Terrestrial is what people who don't like Dynasts call them. And since we're about to really dislike this guy, we may as well get the language right."

"Whatever," I replied agreeably. There were sudden shouts and cries from the far end, and we hopped the mansion's outer wall and tore across the manicured lawns. The guards were distracted and didn't notice us as we vaulted ornamental rails. I was in midair above a beautifully trimmed hedge before the first cry went up from our side of the building.

Directly below me, where I had been intending to land, was a magnificently armored specimen of fighting potential in full war regalia. Lacquered plates bound together to form mail protected his head and blossomed with pointy bits, dissuading me from simply landing on him. Even as I sailed downwards, his hand flew through a circular motion, whipping the long curved blade at his side from the sheath in an exquisitely practiced motion. Dog, who lacked my jumping abilities, crashed from the solid mass of greenery I was descending over and hit the guard in the knees, the only part of him that wasn't pointy. Feet went out from underneath his body, the guard missed his swing, and tumbled to the ground only scarcely before my knees smashed into the side of his ornamental helmet. There's only so much armor will do when two hundred odd pounds of me comes crashing down on top of it, sandwiching the head between knees and a flagstone walkway. I rolled off and stood up, and quickly stole his sword. Clockwork Dog stole the matching knife. We set off towards the mansion again.

More cries went up when we leaped the circling stream in its sculpted marble path. Two guards, equipped just as the last, had come around the rear corner, and sent up a cry. We were only a dozen feet from a small door, but by the time we got there someone inside had locked it. I stepped away, dropped into a stance, and yelled, "Can you pick it?" to Dog.

"Sure," he replied with a futile laugh, not filling me with confidence. The guard on the left was outdistancing his companion, and we met in clash of blades that showered my unprotected eyes in sparks. I rolled my body out of the way and lashed out at his feet. He leaped clear and tumbled with a beautiful combat roll. My master would have been proud. The man behind tried to take my head off, and I barely parried. I pivoted to try to get behind him, and spared a glance at my comrade. There was no chance I'd be able to beat both of these guys at the same time.

Dog crouched, stared at the lock for a second, then backed up and body checked it will all his strength. On the third hit the door splintered. He vanished inside.

The first guy was back on his feet now, and with his comrade they moved to force me to the wall. There was no place to run, so I feinted at one, lunged for the other, and ducked to avoid the first's riposte. They realized immediately I was no novice with the blade, and launched blinding flurries, relying on their numbers to batter through my guard. It should have worked too, but Dog reappeared with a barrel and smashed one distracted guard over the head. Whiskey flew everywhere, and sparks from my desperate defense met the crude but potent mountain beverage. Everything caught fire, including me. Fortunately, I wasn't burning as bad as the guard.

He shrieked like a cat plunged into hell even though the fire couldn't have gotten into his armor yet, and dove headfirst into the shallow ornamental river. That didn't work too well for him. While the second guard finished his combo, he only tagged me once. I feinted for his legs, swung a burning sleeve at his eyes to blind him, and booted him in the chest, knocking him after his fellow. Then I dropped and rolled, putting out the alcohol, and entered the house.

This would have been a great place to rob, had I still been in that line of work. Provided one could get past the guards, the staggering opulence of the interior ornamentation would have set a successful thief for life. Gold, silver, jade, and platinum graced marble and amber. Ornamental columns soared from floor to ceiling and framed priceless statuary. Someone had polished the floor to a mirror shine. In fact, it was brighter than the mirror I had at home.

"Nice place," Dog observed as we fled through the halls, body breaching doors as they appeared, heading inwards.

"Love to visit again," I replied. We came around a corner, and another armed man tried to block our way. As my companion dropped to his knees and slid between the guard's legs, I took four running steps from an end table to the wall to the ceiling and sailed above his head. The guard was perplexed and didn't decide to attempt to kill me until I was past. Dog smashed the side of one mailed knee as he went by, and that guard took a sudden inadvertent interest in the floor.

"Don't think they'll invite you," Dog added.

"Why not?" I retorted. In unison we crashed into the next door. The beautiful mahogany held, but the plaster door frame did not.

"You just aren't popular," Dog informed me.

"I've noticed that."

We got up and fled through the foyer. As we went in the trappings grew steadily more and more magnificent, until finally we came to an area so staggeringly wealthy I couldn't imagine that the steel business made anyone this much money. Juxtaposed with the unearthly wealth were dirty footprints. They lead us upstairs and to a final doorway. This one had a curtain instead of a door, depriving us of the joy of a spectacularly destructive entrance, but I cut it in half anyway. That was just for effect.

Inside Firm Grip stared at us, bracing himself for a fight. He was by a small dining table, where a man was eating breakfast, paying out entrance no mind. He was either stupid, blissfully oblivious, or frighteningly powerful. The room itself was all stone and metal, with no wood. The table was cast silver, and had a second table setting that was empty. The breakfast-eater dabbed his lips with a silk napkin and looked up at me.

I'm not one for male beauty, but this guy could have had any girl he wanted in anyplace I've ever been. Not just attractive, he looked regal. The man had charisma. His arched brows conveyed deep thoughtfulness, yet his eyes were youthful and sparkled merrily. His breakfast robe was brilliant red with threads of gold.

"Morning gentlemen," he replied calmly.

"What do you know of Ash Maiden?" I snapped, whipping the point of the long curved blade towards his face. It stopped a hair from his eye, but he never flinched.

"Refresh my memory," he ordered me. His voice was used to command. "Who is Ash Maiden?"

"She's dead," I told him.

"Then I can't very well know her any more, can I?" he replied.

Infuriated, I swept the blade over my head and aimed for one of his hands, attempting to wound him and show we meant business. Unfortunately, he meant more business.

The diner flashed out of his chair, caught my wrist, and struck me in the chest with an open palm. The world stopped, and the moment of being hit lasted forever. Then I flew backwards, sailed through the door I'd entered, and hit a wall hard enough to become lodged in it, my feet dangling a foot above the floor. I couldn't see and could barely breath.

"Wow, that hurt," I gurgled when I stopped sucking air.

"My name is Ragara Aino," he introduced himself, dusting off his smoking jacket. Clockwork Dog stared at him and brought the knife up defensively. Ragara Aino ignored it. "Now, who are you?"

"Fuzzy Puppy," lied Dog.

"Fuzzy Puppy," repeated Ragara Aino, tasting the words. "Right. And your wall-mounted companion?"

"Fluffy Bunny," I wheezed.

"Ah. Comedians," he judged. "Very well. Firm Grip, are these the men who came to see you?"

"Uh, yeah," answered the foreman, staring at him in awe. He had crept around the room so he could look at me bug-eyed. "You put him into a wall," he whispered in awe.

"Quite. So you three came to my foreman, asked him about Ash Maiden, then followed him when he left my smelting plant. Correct?" he asked Dog.

"More or less."

"I see," he nodded. "Now are you her friends, old lovers, or simply fools?"

"We're vengeance," Dog replied, and lunged at the Terrestrial. He had no chance of winning, but his sudden attack came with such reckless abandon for his own survival, that it drove Ragara back as my calculated strike had not. The Dynast back pedaled, blocking knife strike after knife strike with his bare hands, and every time brilliant gold and burgundy light flashed from his fingertips. Cascading sparks lit the room, overshadowing the candles, and crackled against the stone walls, leaving scorch marks wherever they touched. Dog drove him back, almost to the far wall, before Aino managed to get his balance. Then he replied with a flurry of his own, open hands flicking fire and stardust at Dog's face and eyes. Amazingly, my human friend evaded the immediate retaliation, but the follow up took his legs out from under him. Aino smacked him, twirling his body and lofting him into the air. Before he could land, he struck again and again, flashing hands that burned flesh through clothing. Dog crashed earthward and the air fled his lungs when he hit. Ragara twisted, and cocked a strike that would have broken the fallen man's body into pieces. It never landed.

"Know that if you hurt him again, you will die," said Angel in a voice like the death she promised. The razor edge of a stolen blade lay against the Dynast's spine, and she stood with all her weight coiled against it. For a moment the Dynast considered the situation, then relaxed, and stood erect very slowly.

"And you are?" he asked.

"Cuddly Kitten," she replied, her voice never changing. I realized then that Angel was scary when she was pissed, something I'd been objectively aware of before but never really known on an emotional level.

"Very well, Cuddly Kitten, I'll let him live," Ragara replied. "I'm Ragara Aino, though I suddenly regret I wasn't named Squiggles the Fox. Peer pressure, you know." He looked around and saw Firm Grip, who'd lost his grip on consciousness and lay in a heap.

"We want to know what happened to Ash Maiden. Did you order her killed or did you do it yourself?" Angel asked.

"Neither, to be perfectly honest." At the point of a sword held by a woman with a self preservation instinct only in comparison to me, he looked completely at ease. His voice was smooth as the silk he wore. By now I was beginning to get my senses back, a testament to how hard he'd hit me. I noticed then that Ragara's clothes were damaged as they shouldn't have been. They weren't torn but burned.

"But you know who did," Angel added. "Or else that," she cocked her head to the big pile of steel worker without moving her eyes. "Would never have come running straight to you."

The Terrestrial turned around very slowly, his hands held open away from his sides. When he stopped the point of her blade nestled against his Adam's apple. "Now that's an interesting question. One that might be worth something," he answered.

"It wasn't a question, and it's worth me running three feet of steel through your throat," she answered.

I managed to pry myself out of the wall. While I still had the sword handle clutched in my grip, the blade lay in several pieces on the floor. Discarding the useless hunk of metal, I flexed my fingers, and walked back into the room with the rest.

"How do you feel, baby?" asked Angel.

"Wonderful, Kitten."

"Who are you?" he asked again. "Anathema?"

"Angry," I replied.

"No, you're too weak. You're mortals, aren't you? All three of you are really mortals. That's amazing. I'm as impressed with your bravery as I am awed by your stupidity." With that he threw his head back in a burst of wild laughter. It was enjoyment tainted with mockery. It was also overwhelmingly cocky. "I can't wait to tell this story at my next party. It'll be worth the damage, just for that."

"Not if you don't answer our questions," I told him. "You won't make it to your next party."

"Oh, because the two of you will stop me?"

"We'll kill you," Angel replied.

"You think you can? You think this is all I'm capable of? You think you've seen my true potential?" he retorted insulted.

"You think you've seen mine?" replied Angel, turning the question back on him.

"Yes, as a matter of fact, I do," Ragara Aino replied, and suddenly burst into brilliant light. Stones of fire tumbled from his shoulders and crashed onto molten rocks by his feet. His hair blossomed with a burgundy glow, and every time his head moved lava flickered from his hair in volcanic plumes of fire and ash. More than ever before a tangible aura of power radiated from him. Rocks tumbled from the ceiling, crashing to the earth around them, as dovetailing streamers of pure Essence radiated from the Dragon-Blooded noble.

Angel lunged, slamming all her weight behind the blade and driving it into his throat. It bounced off burning skin, and Ragara swept it aside with a forearm. Then he lunged for her. She retreated, blocking his advance with the weapon, but only managed to use his momentum to throw herself backwards. I grabbed the table and drove it down onto his head with an overhand swung. He partially blocked, but the brilliant incandescence of his skin proved dangerous, and splintered the metal. Before I could swing again, he swept a foot at my head. It swept inches from my face as I swayed backwards, leaving a smell of sulfur and brimstone. I popped upright and struck as Angel slashed at his legs.

Ragara simply wasn't there. Somehow he moved faster than fist or blade, and counterattacked from a small pedestal. I was ready for the open palm, but even when I blocked it seared my hands, burning my flesh and tearing apart my skin. Angel was able to block his other hand, and it rang against her sword. But then I made the mistake of attacking and found only empty air. I leaned forward and saw that Ragara was bending down, ducking below me, exposing his back. I really thought I could get him, and never noticed his leg striking down like a scorpion's tale. Pain blossomed in the base of my skull, and I tumbled.

Lights flashed on the walls, and the ring of steel echoed through the room. I was able to hold onto conscious to watch the implacable Dynast focus all his attention on Angel, bearing down on her assured of a quick win. But she was elusive, and fled from his onslaught like a feather in the wind. No matter the power and speed he brought to bear, the only thing that suffered was his house. Rents appeared in the walls, and the ceiling collapsed by the door. I honestly thought she had a chance.

But even a lucky mouse can't fight a tiger. She was outclassed, and when she slipped her blade past the near invulnerable guard to flick it across his throat, it only screeched across his throat like fingernails on slate. Ragara cackled wildly, and swung while she was still recovering from her attack. He caught her in the face, the chest, the shoulder and the leg. Blood escaped her skin before fountains of essence fire. Then she dropped, and the Terrestrial stood alone.

"Silken Lotus Style," he said to himself. At first his aura was too bright to see through and blotted out his features, but as he panted it faded until he could be seen like a shadow on the sun. "That's only taught in the far south, where the assassin guild of the Black Adder does business. You may be a mortal my dear, but you are not just after revenge for that dead twit." With a curious expression, he shook his head and turned away.

I punched him in the face as hard as I possibly could, throwing my body after my fist in a suicidal effort that held nothing back. My knuckles caught him dead in the jaw, and he tumbled backwards into a wall. Every bone in my hand shattered.

"Tell me who killed her," I demanded, trying to pick myself off the ground with only one hand.

"You worthless peasant," cursed the Dynast. "You blasphemous clod. You ant, you maggot, you filth, you swine." Then he lapsed into the high tongue of the Scarlet Empire, which I'd never learned. His composure was gone, and he screeched profanity at me like a spoiled child. When he stood up, I could see I'd broken his jaw, which unfortunately did nothing to prevent him from talking.

Doubled over, I got my feet under me, but my back didn't have enough strength to pull me erect. Ragara Aino took two running steps and punted my face, throwing me backwards. I flipped twice before destroying a delicate dresser, crashing to a heap with splinters and finery tumbling about me. The Dynast strode over and stomped on me until I couldn't distinguish between the impacts of his foot. Eventually, I lost conscious.

Torture was being unconscious but denied relief from my dreams. I walked across an alpine meadow, where grass met the sky on the shoulders of great peaks, and all the world's forests were spread below me, running off to the Wyld in the distance. Slight breezes danced through my hair, and zephyrs of the north kissed my neck. It was a place burned forever into my memory.

Before me stood the most beautiful woman who will ever have lived. She was fair of skin and lithe of arm. Her eyes transfixed me, even as her thick hair seduced me with its dance upon the air. Every inch of her skin radiated vitality, and the gentle rise and fall of her breast was as light as the air she breathed. She was so beautiful that hurt, even in my memory.

"I love you, Ash Maiden. I did then, and I do now. I always will," I repeated my words. I knew what she had said then. She had looked down quietly and so sad my heart broke, even as she cried that she had to break it.

"I love you too," she told me in this place. She always did in the dream.

"Forever?" I asked.

"So long as you are with me."

I held her close. She whispered she'd never leave me, she would always understand, and she would touch me so my turmoil calmed to tranquility. She forgave me all my sins, just because I asked. In her arms I could sleep again.

"I wish this was real," I whispered, holding her so tight.

"So long as I'm in your dream I am," she told me. "Here I'm alive. Stay with me so I don't have to die."

"Forever," I promised.

"Forever?" she asked.

"Forever and ever," I swore.

She embraced me back, but her hands were rough on my back, and shook me. I stared up at an ugly face and knew I was awake. For a moment the hurt and longing was so powerful I couldn't keep the anguish under control, and I swore yet again that I would never sleep again. Like every waking since, I didn't think I could survive that dream one more time.

"I think he's gonna cry," yelled the ugly thug, as he shook me by the ropes that bound my wrists. "I think he's honestly going to cry. How hard did you hit him, boss?"

"Hard enough," came a twisted grunt. Ragara Aino walked into my line of sight, looking furious. His face was bandaged, and it interfered with the smooth sound of his voice. Now he growled like Firm Grip had. "Is he awake?"

"Yeah."

"Good. Wake the other two."

The thug left, and the Dynast crouched down in front of me. "You lost, maggot. I won, and I'm going to kill you. You'll be reborn as a worm, perhaps one that lives in a dog's ass. I hope it is a miserable existence for you, deserving of vermin who attacked the chosen of the dragons. You know, I'm not even going to let you get any revenge by haunting me? I've thought of that. No, I have ways of sending you on. I don't know if you'll be able to choose Lethe or to be reborn as an intestinal parasite, but I can assure you your demise will inflict all the suffering I wish I could assure you in the next life.

"That goes for you to," he added, facing out of my field of vision. "You're the she-wolf who tried to cut me. Normally I'd applaud the skill, but now I'm just going to drag information out of you. And you, the stupid one, will get a lesson in truth first and hardest. Weasel, Rat, put that one on the rack."

For some reason, I wasn't the stupid one, because they left me alone. I began to see where we were. It was an underground room, where the roots of great trees hung from the ceiling. The floor was carved into the deep rock that reached waist high up the walls. Angel lay next to me, sorely in need of the mercy she was named to bring. Her face was streaked with blood that dripped into the dirt. Her hands were tied to her feet, doubling her over into a fetal position. While the Dragon-Blooded martial artist raged at her, insulting her and telling her what horrors he intended to inflict, she lay nearly catatonic. I couldn't tell if it was an act, or she was far from the waking world. If so, I prayed her dreams were better than mine.

Clockwork Dog was being carried to a metal rack, where his wrists and ankles were set into iron harnesses. Once there he was bound with leather straps, and stripped to the waist. The rack was set on castors, and it rolled over, leaving him facing down while his bare back lay exposed. Ragara Aino, finally finished with cursing at the comatose Angel, walked over to him and accepted a multitailed whip from one of the thugs. They leered at each other in excitement and stepped back to allow their stone faced boss to work.

"Now," said the Dynast. "Tell me what I want to know."

"You're getting ripped off," instantly replied Dog. "The coke you're buying is one part in seven ash. It should be at most one in twenty."

Ragara, who hadn't even struck yet, paused with the whip behind his head, staring at Dog in confusion. Caught off guard as he was by the apparent nonsequitor, his train of thought derailed. "What?" he sputtered.

"The coke in your lumber yard. It has too much ash in it. That's why it isn't burning as hot. Your supplier is selling you a bad product. You can still get the right burn temperature, but you need to grind the coke first. Also, increase the air intake to the furnaces. Even with good product, they aren't running anywhere near full efficiency," Dog explained.

"That wasn't what I was asking," replied the Dynast.

"I know, but I assume you don't like wasting money. Given bad fuel and a dirty burn, you're wasting nearly half your fuel budget. I don't know how much money that is, but given the size of the foundry, it's got to be at least a talent a year."

Our captor leaned very close to Dog and pulled his chin with the whip handle until they were looking at each other eye to eye. "How do you know that?" he asked, searching Dog's eyes. Dog stared back, looking into the conflicted brown eyes of the supernaturally potent Dynast. There was fury there, but there was also greed.

"I looked at your lumber yard. You could have figured it out too, of course. It's not hard to tell. But your yard man didn't check closely enough."

"It is hard to get good help these days," agreed Ragara.

"Please don't hit me," added Dog.

"Now, your true nature comes out," Ragara gloated. "I'm going to go check that myself. If you're telling me the truth, your death shall be quicker, and I may forgive some of your transgressions." The other promised as he dropped the whip onto Dog's back. It lay between his shoulder blades. Grunting, Ragara stepped away from Dog as if he was soiled to be in the captive's presence.

"What about the others?"

"Death by fire."

"What if I told you why your steel rusts faster than it should, and how to fix that? Or why the molds keep breaking?" continued Dog.

Ragara looked at him curiously. "How do you know I won't just torture it out of you?"

"Because you just promised you wouldn't, and if you do anyway, then I know you'll only break your word again. Besides, there are a lot of things wrong with your plant, and I won't tell you how to fix them. If you torture me, you won't even know if I'm telling the truth, or just lying to make you stop hitting me. And you can't afford to waste entire lines of steel to test my theories, but can't afford to keep wasting money doing it the wrong way."

"Can't afford to waste money?" the Dynast scoffed. "Do you have any idea how much money I have?"

"Enough that you want more, and you're making enough that the percentage you lose every year replacing your molds unnecessarily has got to be huge. How much is a mold worth? A house? Two?"

"Shut up," ordered the rich and greedy Dragon-Blood.

"Check the coke," promised Dog, ignoring the order. "See if I'm right."

"We shall see," retorted Ragara Aino, and he turned to go. His men, disappointed that no one was going to be tortured, left with him. There was no door to this room, so they blocked the entrance with a table, and piled boxes in front of it on the other side. We were temporarily alone.

"Have I ever told you that you're my hero?" asked Angel, not moving in the slightest from her position of apparent unconsciousness.

"No," replied Dog. "But now is a perfect time to start."

"I'll name my firstborn after you," she promised.

"Can I be the father?" he asked. She laughed like he was joking, and he played it off like he was just trying to raise her spirits.

"I don't suppose-" I asked, leaving the question unfinished.

"I lie a lot," Dog admitted blandly. "It's one of my failings. But the coke part is correct. It will take him at a while to go down there and check. I did my part. Ending, think of a way to get out of here."

We had all been tied the same way, hands to legs in front of us. Fortunately, when I'd punched Ragara his face had not only broken my fingers, hand, and wrist, but my radius and ulna were both fractured completely. They gave when I pushed them, at the minor cost of unbelievable pain. It wasn't hard to figure a way out of my bonds, but it was really, really going to hurt.

I bent my hand into a cylinder and worked it through the rope. Sometimes my vision would white-out in pain, but I clung to consciousness because my dreams were worse. Eventually, I got my broken hand free. That loosened the ropes and soon I was standing. Dog was next, and then Angel. Of all of us, Dog was in the best shape, since he'd gone down the fastest. We made Angel comfortable since with her thigh broken she couldn't walk. Then we turned to the blocked door.

"Not so much," I concluded after throwing my weight against it. It didn't even budge. If some of Ragara's iron was stored in this basement, he could have barricaded that shut so a dozen men wouldn't have been able to force it. We considered the ceiling, interspersed with tree roots as it was. "Ideas, smart guy?" I asked.

"Not getting any," he replied.

"You're useless," I concluded. "For that, I get to father Angel's baby she names after you."

"The hell you are," Dog replied. "Any baby of yours will be dumb, ugly and crazy, and I refuse to let you besmirch my good name."

"I think I'm insulted by that," judged Angel.

"Sorry," apologized Dog. "You could never have a baby as dumb, ugly, or nearly as crazy as The Ending is."

"That wasn't exactly a compliment," she observed.

"You did agree with his plan to attack a Dynast. I told you that wasn't a good idea," he pointed out.

"You came to," she retorted.

Dog looked at her with an inscrutable expression. "I did at that. Since I don't have the crazy excuse, I must just be dumb."

I interrupted to head that line of conversation off. This was neither the time nor the place, and we needed to focus. "What about digging through the ceiling? How deep can we be if those roots reach this far?"

"Up to twice the height of the tree," Dog observed, turning to examine them with me. "So conceivably a hundred feet deep or more."

"Could we rig something so the roof collapses? We could wait until Ragara returns, pull the ceiling down on him, and then make our escape," I suggested.

"First, he's an Immaculate Dragon-Blood. Collapsing the room would probably only annoy him. Second, he has goons, lots of them, and we're in no condition to fight our way out of here."

"You're not being very positive, here," I scolded him.

"I'm just saying it wouldn't work," he replied. "I'm not preventing you from doing it."

"Hey guys, I'm getting a little light headed, so I'm going to take a nap now. Wake me when we have to fight somebody," interjected Angel in a dreamy tone. Immediately we stopped thinking about escape and turned to her. She was losing blood, fast, from a number of frighteningly deep cuts she'd taken in the fight. My plan with the ceiling would take time we didn't have. We needed an alternative.

"The wall," Dog said without explanation while I tried to stop her bleeding. We'd put her down, and I was doing what I could to staunch the wounds. Our shirts went to that purpose, but there wasn't much blood left in her. In addition, instead of simply being beaten, most of her injuries were second or third degree burns, and the blood seeped through the skin. Dog couldn't watch my desperate, ineffectual treatment. Going to the wall, he started digging at the dirt with his fingers until they bled. He worked near the door, and I went to help him with my good hand. With desperation urging us on, we put a hole in the wall just past the pile of wooden cases that blocked the door. Cascades of dirt tumbled down from above, and the earth creaked, but the roots held it still.

"Help me lift her," Dog told me.

"No, I'll carry her. You fight," I disagreed.

He looked up at me. "You know you're better at that then I am."

"And she's better than us both, but she's out and I only have one hand. But my back isn't broken, so at least we won't slow you down. I'll carry her; you fight."

"I don't know if I can," he admitted quietly.

"There's no choice. I can't do it. Just remember, if you lose, she dies. We do to, but let's not kid ourselves about what you care about, shall we?"

Dog said nothing else as he rolled Angel onto my back as gently as he could. He stabilized her as I stood, and held her cheek a moment longer then he had too before forcefully turning away. Without pause he crept through the hole and stalked down the hallway. I followed.

There was no one in the next room, but either Weasel or Rat sat in the room beyond, smoking a hand rolled cigarette. Dog jumped him from behind, landed on his back, and just started hitting him as fast and ruthlessly as he could. Both Angel and I had shown him a few tricks, so he knew the basics of what he was doing, but only barely. What he lacked in skill he made up for in desperation and the element of surprise.

I felt somewhat bad about that. Not for Rat (I think is was Rat) because he deserved everything he got, and I watched Clockwork Dog smash his teeth out against a stone with apathy. No, I felt sorry for Dog, because to make him fight with desperation I'd had to beat him in the face with losing the woman he loved. That was pretty miserable, made worse by the fact that I knew she didn't love him back. Still, everything I'd said had been true, and unrequited love certainly wasn't going to get requited if we all got killed when Ragara Aino returned. Yet it was with a low feeling of guilt poisoning my gut that I watched him do terrible things to the thug until we knew he wouldn't get up any time soon. From there we continued to creep on. Twice more he ambushed sentries, lunging at them from the darkness, where the grime that smeared his skin had camouflaged his approach. When he laid their bodies in corners, and beckoned us onwards, I observed their wounds, noting the ferocity that had inflicted them and felt even worse for him.

Not far beyond that was a stair that went up. We went until the stairs turned from rough earth to laid stone. There we turned aside, and crossed a wide cellar filled with wine bottles and casks. In the back several great beams were clustered together, supporting the ceiling. We hid behind that so Dog could go scout out ahead. He returned shortly.

"There's five men at the top of the stairs, and more outside. Not like the ones we've seen so far, they're armed and armored like the guards we fought in the garden. I don't know why they're up there, but I know I can't take that many at once."

"All right," I accepted that. "What next?"

"Let me think," he replied. His lips moved like they had in the barn, when he'd felt the weight of his cowardice for not admitting to Angel what he'd really said. In a burst of intuition, I realized he was working himself up to a hopeless fight, just to do something while she was bleeding. Maybe that was what we had to do, but I didn't want it to happen when he thought he was failing her.

"You did good," I told him, breaking him out of his reverie. "Three men, you were injured, and we're in a bad way."

"Not good enough," he replied, somewhat despairingly.

"Good enough," I disagreed. "We're here, aren't we? We're not still in that room."

"But now I have to fight ten times that many more," he objected.

"Only if there's no other way. Any chance that brain of yours can think us around having to fight half a claw of armed guards?" I asked.

"No," he replied, staring up at the ceiling. He looked at it blankly for several seconds. "Yes," he contradicted himself, staring upwards curiously.

"Digging?" I asked.

"No, burning," he explained. With that he ran to a wall were small casks stood in neat rows. He picked one, uncorked it, and raced back to liberally douse the wooden pillar with its contents, whiskey by the smell. He explained more while he worked, "There were no pillars below. Here we're closer to the surface with less weight on the roof, but now just in this one place, there are beams holding up the ceiling. Why?"

"Weak spot?" I suggested. He finished his barrel, got two more, and handed me one. I dumped that out next to his, covering the old wood.

"Possible. Or something very heavy just above this point. Perhaps the pump that moves the water in Ragara's little stream, or a particularly heavy, and therefore valuable bit of statuary. Sold gold water nymphs, or something."

"Right above us?" I asked.

"Almost certainly. Get back," he ordered.

"How are you going to light it?" I asked, doing as he bid. It was a dumb question, but I was getting a bit heady. Ragara obviously kept some potent stuff in his basement. In response, he held up Rat's package of tobacco, and his flint and steel.

"There are times when I really need a cigarette," he explained and started sparking.

The room was almost full of alcohol vapors. They caught on the first spark, and flash fires raced upwards. The pillars caught instantly, but the fires also found homes in the barrel racks. It was all almost silent save the crackling that earth walls muffled. We huddled by the door, listening for the guards above and greedily gulping fresh air before the fire could get it. We very nearly asphyxiated on hot gas before the creaking in the center got louder, and the roof started buckling.

Half the ceiling collapsed at once, smashing wine bottles and destroying exotic cheeses. Two ornamental streams broke and poured down the gaping hole, knocking over the remaining hard liqueur. Barrels started cracking around us as we ran to the hole, climbed up a beautiful marble representation of the Scarlet Empress done in rubies and crimson, and popped out of the earth. Air, saturated with alcohol fumes, began to whistle up out of the dirt, carrying smoke. We were running before the air itself caught fire, sending gouts of blue fire everywhere. Fortunately, the entire garden started to burn behind us, covering our escape.

"That guy is really going to be mad," I observed to Clockwork Dog as we scrambled away from the manor house.

"I never really liked him that much," Dog admitted.

"Really?"

"Yep. Very gaudy taste. No books. All wealth, no culture."

"What about now?" I asked, as a pillar of smoke rose from the exquisite yard, reaching for the sky.

"Less money, still no culture."

"Think he'll take it personally?" I asked.

"Oh, I hope so," Dog enthused to me. "Let's not be here when he finds out, shall we?"

"Good plan," I agreed. We hopped a low wall and got away from there with all due haste.


	3. Chapter 2

The Broken Circle

Act 2

As desperately as we needed to bring Angel to medical care, taking her directly to one of the doctors of Nibeldamt would prove its own death sentence. We were of the opinion that the Dynast would probably be a little testy after everything that had transpired and would know that we were looking for aid. Nibeldamt was a big place, but there were only so many places we could hide from him. Instead we took advantage of the fact that Ragara's mansion was on the outskirts of town. We made for the mountains, and found a small cave. It was littered with old spoor of wolf and bear, but showed no occupancy for a while. There I laid Angel down, and made her as comfortable as possible. Clockwork Dog set to work on her bandages, while I examined my hand.

It was all fucked up. I couldn't even feel most of it any more, something I was quite grateful for. My fingers were turning odd colors and warped unnaturally. Nothing responded to my commands. I shrugged. The hand would simply be the first of the prices I was willing to pay. Angel wasn't one of those prices though.

After she was attended to, Dog and I stepped outside and spread out, looking for running water. The cave bore signs that at some point it had been a stream head. The water course should be somewhere nearby. In time we found it and contrived methods of carrying water back from the broad leaves of great trees.

There was a man-shaped thing standing outside the cave. It was the height of a bear and as furry, but its legs and body were not ursine in shape. Naked if such a term could be applied to something with such a coat of hair, the creature rested on hand on the roof of the cave mouth and stared within. Tufted ears perked up as we approached, and the squat head turned to face us. It had a snout like a bear below a high forehead. The dark brown fur was lighter across its face, highlighted with gold and burgundy. I was drawn to the eyes. They were pure gold, but blazing hot like the metal still within a furnace. It had no pupils or irises. Dog and I paused.

"Mortals, have you come to my abode to offer me a sacrifice?" it asked. The voice was deep, fitting that it should come from the mountainous body. It's lungs must have been cavernous and provided a voice that was filled with age and the old powers.

"If you try to take her, I will wreak such a horror upon you that death will seem a mercy when I am finished. And if you survive and I die, I will curse you with my dying breath and haunt you till the end of times, bending the efforts of mortal men to wreck your home and destroy anything that you care about," Clockwork Dog replied.

I looked at him astonished. "Good man!" I exclaimed. "I think you're getting the rhythm of this."

The shaggy primordial man looked at us bemused. "Mortals, do you have any idea who I am?"

"Don't know, don't care, should you mean to harm her." Dog replied.

"And are you also filled with this lunacy?" it asked me.

Now if there's one thing I was filled with, lunacy would be a good name for it. "I'm not as creative as he is, but I'm a lot more spiteful," I admitted. "Should you harm her, there is no limit to the horrors I will eagerly seek out to visit upon you, until the gods come to plead with me to stop our revenge."

"You stand in the presence of a god now!" it exclaimed. "I am Shogg, lord of these mountains. You would do well to make obeisance if you don't want to start a conflict with one beyond you."

"Listen Shogg, we just picked a fight with a Dynast, lost, and as soon as we can we're going to go do it again. Picking fights with those who think they're beyond us is what we do," I retorted.

"It's like our thing," Dog agreed.

Shogg leaned forward, looming over us. I think he expected cowering, but we leaned forward right back out of stubborn belligerence. "Which Dynast?" the god asked.

Dog and I exchanged a look. His look asked me how far I wanted to go, and my look told him I thought there was a chance we had something in common with this forest god. I decided to take some risks. "Ragara Aino. We assaulted him in his house-"

"Which we later set afire," Dog interjected.

"-broke his jaw-"

"-assaulted his servants-"

"-ruined his breakfast-"

"-and insulted his parentage," Dog concluded.

"We did?" I paused, not remembering the last point.

"It was while you were still out. I woke up first, and told him his conception followed his father finding attention in the hairy embrace of an amorous goat. I didn't stay awake for long," Dog filled me in.

"I knew I liked you for a reason," I responded, impressed.

Shogg was taken aback quite literally, for he ceased to loom over us and stood erect. "You said all this to a Immaculate martial artist of the Blessed Isle? Did you not know he would bury such as you in a conflict?"

"Lord Shogg, this was after he buried us in a fight," I responded.

"He hurt her," Dog said with a gesture towards the silent repose of Fall of Angels. "We took that very seriously."

"Immaculate Dragon or peon, noble or peasant, god or ant, we don't let that sort of thing slide," I continued.

The forest god stared at us, aghast at our complete mockery of propriety. "Let's be honest," I got the conversation back on the tangent I wanted. "If you have any loyalty to Ragara Aino, you may as well run back to your master and tell him where we are. He would take anything less as an insult, and actually helping us would be tantamount to a personal attack."

"Especially if you helped us recuperate, because after that we're going to personally attack him," Dog clarified.

"Again," I added.

"Only nastier."

"Hopefully in a more humiliating fashion."

"And maybe burn the other half of his house down."

"Lord Shogg has no master!" Shogg interrupted us. "That upstart has no respect for the emissaries of Yu Shan, and only my better manners oblige me to aid him on the full moon. The rest of the time, he may look to his own way, as I shall look to the forest." His twisted words hinted at the truth so blatantly I couldn't believe he wasn't simply admitting Ragara beat submission out of him.

"Please tell me, divine one, do manners dictate anything about healing mortals who attacked this disrespectful Dynast?" I asked.

"No," Shogg replied slyly. "They never mention anything of the sort." Of course, beating submission into someone rarely makes friends as well.

"Then step into our parlor, Lord Shogg of the Nibeldamt Mountains. Please lower yourself to accepting our meager mortal hospitality," Dog beckoned him with a bow. "As soon as we are healed, we intend to wreak a terrible vengeance on the one who thinks himself your master. Perhaps our future plans might interest you?"

"With pleasure," the god accepted, and joined us in the cave.

We flattered and fawned on him as best we could. We told him how honored we were that he deigned to speak with us, and Dog lapsed into such flowery praise that I was struck silent since my ability to lie was vastly inferior to his. Still, by the time Shogg, self-styled Lord of the Mountains, left, the bones in my hand were set, and healing, and Angel rested easily. Her bleeding had stopped, and no longer was her breathing labored. We'd sworn to eat only the products of the trees and bushes so long as we remained, but since I didn't really feel like hunting a wild boar the fair way, that was an easy oath to make. Of Ash Maiden, Shogg knew nothing, save that she had not died in his mountains. She came here from time to time, but he paid no more attention to her that any other mortal.

When our Angel awoke, we filled in any parts of the story she had been unconscious for. Dog was self-effacing about his role taunting our captor, but I told it with joy, implying a self-sacrificing aspect to it. That it had resulted in Dog being the first on the rack instead of either of us I attributed to his quick thinking, and noted that had also paved the way for him to talk us out of immediate peril. Angel was impressed. Dog of course denied that he had such noble goals, but he'd already established himself as a liar. Now he came across being humbly dishonest. After that I said nothing more on the subject, leaving the ideas I hoped I had planted in her mind to lay in fertile soil. Just because the love of my life was dead was no reason not to help my ally get his.

"There are a couple things we learned from Shogg," I continued, when we had gotten to the present. "The first is that Ragara Aino is, or rather was, a martial artist trained in their egocentric cult of self-love. He left after learning the parts involving beating up his enemies, but before taking oaths that would interrupt his hedonism."

"Like chastity or poverty?" Angel surmised. "He didn't look like the type to take well to either of those."

"Exactly," Dog agreed. "Unfortunately, that means he's learned some or all of the Immaculate Style of Fire, at least from what I could tell. Which means he's probably even more capable than he showed us, but for him to unleash his true power, he'd have killed us. Since he wanted us alive, he kept himself somewhat under control."

"Oh, that's not good. He's more powerful then we saw?" she protested.

"Much more, most likely," Dog assented. "In addition, he's married to a Pelep, who may be as powerful as he is. Shogg observed her during the spring thaw, escorting a cargo of steel down the river. From what I know of House Peleps, she probably manages the business side of things, arranging sales and transport times. While she may not be as dangerous as him in a fight, she should have most of their armed guards with her, which means when she returns they'll have a small army to chase us with."

"Furthermore, we don't know what connection he, or they, have to Ash Maiden's murderer," I continued. "Obviously they have some."

"Ragara wouldn't have strangled her," Angel concluded. "He has no need to. What about his bride? Do you know anything about her?"

"Not really. I'd never met Aino before now and doubt I'd know his wife either."

I looked at him curiously. Angel mirrored my expression. By common agreement, we couldn't directly ask him how he would have met a Dynast, nor why he now referred to one with such familiarity. Much as we wanted him to explain, Clockwork Dog met our gazes levelly and volunteered nothing.

"Anyway, it means we have a limited about of time to work before Ragara's personal army returns. The spring thaw was several months ago, and if she took the cargo to the meeting of the Meander and the Rock, she could already be on her way back," Dog continued, changing topics of conversation with such tactlessness that we clearly understood his past was still off limits. With a sigh he admitted, "We're not much closer to finding out who killed Ash Maiden then when we began."

"Not true," I disagreed. "We know several things. First, Ragara Aino may not have done it himself, but he knows either who did or has suspicions. Secondly, we know he wanted us alive, and wanted information out of us. Finally, he was perfectly prepared to believe we were either Anathema or Terrestrials, and was surprised when we weren't. That tells me there's another faction at work in Nibeldamt, one Ragara Aino half expects to send powerful assassins after him, and one he's inclined to believe killed Ash Maiden."

"The other foundries," said Angel, suddenly coming to a logical conclusion after silently placing the intervening blocks. "Ragara controls one foundry, maybe more, and clearly makes a lot of money doing it. If someone else controls the other, they could be feuding and with this much money at stake, they afford some very exotic assassins."

"We should go and find out who controls them, and if they have the kind of money you think they do," I decided. Then, in consideration for her injured state, I added, "You should eat something first."

"You mean tonight?" Dog exclaimed.

"Of course. It's not much past noon now. We should be able to make it in time for the evening shift change. We'll be disguised by the masses."

"Are you mad? We need time to recover," Dog violently dissented, rising to his feet from his rocky seat and looked down at me. I could see his proverbial hackles rising.

"Dog, that Dynast heals faster than we do. He has an army on the way. Time is not on our side. Besides, right now he's devoting his efforts to rebuilding his house and ascertaining how much damage we did. This is the perfect time to do some exploration, especially since we're going to give his estates a wide berth."

"Her leg is broken, as is your hand! Why do we have to go now?"

I flexed my fingers a few times. They ached when the tendons moved over the wounded bone. "I'll fight with my left," I concluded. "Besides, we aren't looking for a fight. We just want information."

"You just want to find a noble way to die!" Dog snapped. "And you'll take the both of us with you."

That hurt.

"Listen to me, you sniveling maggot," I snarled, suddenly furious as my sleep deprived rage blasted into overdrive. "I have done-"

"Boys, help," interrupted Angel. With a groan she turned sideways on the wide stone she lay on, and got her feet under her. Both Dog and I paused, standing erect over her supine form. Her first attempt to stand didn't work, but then she grabbed a hold of the two of us and pulled herself upright. We instinctively cupped her arms as she did, and soon she stood between us. That forced us to draw away from each other and cleared the air. "Dog, we can't stay here. If Shogg the forest god is beholden to Ragara, he's probably running there right now to tell him where we are. Maybe he'll just tell everything to curry favor and maybe he's try to bargain with the knowledge, but our position here isn't safe. Also, we do need information, and Ending's logic is sound. But we both know he's hiding something, because he lies like I act on stage, a terrible thing to watch that fools no one." She turned to face me, and asked, "So, tell us, what are you hiding? Why do we have to go now?"

I stared at the two of them. "It doesn't matter," I explained. "It's just a personal thing."

"This whole thing is a personal thing," Angel countered.

"Don't worry about it," I said again, and turned my back on them to look at the stars that speckled the sky through the tree branches.

Dog impressed me then. I hadn't known his self control was so great. "Ending, I apologize. You would not throw away our lives." That must have been hard to say, and recognition of that struck me deeper than his initial accusation. Because I didn't know if he was right, and it frightened me that I might very well do what he trusted me not to.

"Forgiven," I replied. "I'm sorry as well." I turned to face him, and made a slight head bow to acknowledge he'd taken the higher ground by laying aside his pride first.

"Good. Now kiss and make up," ordered Angel.

"No," we said in unison.

"Damn. That would have been some entertainment," she opined.

"Can we go now?" I asked. "We do need to leave soon if we want to make the shift change."

"You still haven't told us what's so important about leaving now," Angel observed.

"Would you please drop it?" I asked again. "You know my logic, and you said yourself my reasoning is sound. Please leave my issues alone."

"Very well," Angel replied. Dog made noises to the contrary, but Angel jabbed him in the ribs with one of her sharp little elbows, and he stopped making any sound but painful grunts. "Let's be honest. We are on a half mad vengeance crusade, so I can't get too upset about a little personal mania. But you lose all privileges to criticize others for acting crazy until you talk to us," she judged. "You also take a burden of proof on yourself when proposing our course of action, because we can reasonably wonder if you're being influenced by whatever it is you won't talk about."

"Fine," I relented.

"Good. Now, Dog, what do you think we should do?" she asked.

"Go to Nibeldamt and find out who owns the other foundries. While we're there, we can make sure no harm has come to Anvil or his family from our actions," he concluded.

The other two of us agreed. We ate what we could and drank from the stream. Angel tested herself and discovered she could walk slowly and her funeral robes concealed her limp. The robes themselves were no longer a pure white, but had been tainted by soot and ash to a dismal gray. It was fitting.

Shortly after nightfall, we crept into town, and patrolled the city streets. There were seven foundries, of which three were brightly emblazoned with the heraldic arms of House Ragara. Also emblazoned with such were counting houses, farmers markets and butcher shops, several temples, and the largest pier into the river. Along the way we watched Anvil's house just long enough to be sure that he still lived there, and seemed in good health. Reassured that no harm had come to him through our efforts, we continued our investigation.

Of the other four foundries, all carried the colors of brilliant crimson peaks on a field of green. The same symbol was repeated on great lumberyards to the south, and the city's formal garrison. Rows of houses and shops bore the crimson and green, or stylized iron-wrought portrayals of it. Clockwork Dog glanced at it and concluded 'Gens Maheka' in a confident tone. On the southern end of the city stood a large estate, less ostentatious than that of the Dynast, but more defensible. Above it blew the crimson and green over ornate walls that remained fully functional. Carvings and bass reliefs did not begin until well up the outer wall, and several guards marched rounds at regular intervals. Four men in simpler but no less effective armor stood before a vast steel portcullis at attention. Though the gate was closed for the evening, they showed no signs of slacking in their duty.

"Let's break in," I decided from the safety of a nearby temple belfry we'd taken refuge in.

"That didn't work so well last time," Dog pointed out.

"We're more prepared now," I countered.

"You and I are still injured, and they'll be alert after what we did to Ragara," Angel replied.

"What if we set fire to it first?"

"No," they said in unison.

"Damn."

I looked into their eyes as I had not done since the funeral nearly a month ago. I had a tendency to see people as my memories of them, and not as they truly were. Now I saw that Clockwork Dog was tired, but exhaustion and recovery had worn aside some of the softer aspects of his personality. He was more protective of Angel then he had been before, as he came to understand that as powerful and capable as she was, she was not immortal. But there were no traces of doubt in his eyes. He was dedicated to the cause as he had not been before. Angel was different. For the first time, the knowledge that she could be beaten and easily had come upon her. It frightened her a little. But that had tempered her brashness as she had promised she would temper my mania. Some overconfidence had been stripped from her like the weakness in Dog. Still, she betrayed no awareness of his feelings, nor any inkling of returning them.

As for me, when I took a moment of introspection, I found only whirling thoughts filed with chaos. My dreams had not been kind recently, and now I feared sleep like it was a savage beast that hunted me. After a moment, I realized that when I looked into my own heart I grew frightened of what I found, and I ceased to look inwards. Instead I directed my efforts towards the house that bore the Gens Maheka crest. My thoughts lashed at it like a chaotic sandstorm, seeking a weakness in the problem.

"If we can't attack them, and we cannot sneak in, then we must meet with them evenly. But how can we impel them to meet with us?" I asked.

"Go knock on the front gate," suggested Dog with a shrug.

"And offer them what?" I asked.

"Offer to burn Ragara's mansion down," Angel offered, seeking a laugh. Neither of us obliged, because we were staring at her very seriously.

"We could," I noted carefully, trying to direct my scattered and sleep deprived thoughts at the problem. "Surely our work is known now."

"What do you want to do?" scoffed Angel. "Walk up to the front gate and pound on it, asking for an audience with the lord of the manor to discuss some freelance arson?"

Which is exactly what I did not half an hour later. The guards stared at me like I was a madman, but I ignored them until an impeccably dressed attaché came to see what I wanted.

"To see the master of the house," I replied.

"I see," he murmured, casting a disparaging glance at me. "Are you in mourning for something? Is this about the funeral, because this isn't the way to ask for a funeral plot, something we are willing to provide through other avenues," he suggested in a clear attempt to make me go away.

"It isn't about a funeral plot," I replied calmly. "My dearly beloved is already buried. I'm here about Ragara Aino."

"That would be Prince Ragara to you," he correctly me absently, with the air of a man discussing international economics with a village idiot. "I'll speak to my master's secretary. And your name is?"

"Fluffy Bunny," I replied in a tone completely devoid of humor.

"You can go now," he replied instantly.

"Why don't you go tell your master I'm waiting for him?"

"Because you're either an imbecile or a moron, and he doesn't have time for either."

"We shall see," I replied. Then I strolled off the manor grounds and took a seat on a low pile of boulders by a partially built house. The attaché wandered off, no doubt to laugh about my appearance with the other underlings and never mention it to anyone of import. In time, my companions joined me that we might quickly discourse on our next move.

"Didn't go so well," Dog surmised.

"He won't even take a message to the master of the house," I said of the attaché. "We need another plan to get in."

"Without involving any constructive arson," Dog prefixed his question. "Do you have a suggestion for getting in there before the minions of our favorite Dynast come howling for our heads?"

"You're presenting me with an unfair limitation," I complained.

"That would be a 'no,'" Angel translated for him.

"Should you be thinking right now?" I asked. "Deciphering clues or something?"

"There's nothing to decipher," he replied. "We've established that the Maheka spies in the house of Ragara are either known or suspected. Ragara's spies in the Maheka house are unknown but assumed. Ragara possesses more personal power then these guys do, but lacks the support they have since Lookshy stands directly between him and his power base." Dog shrugged. "Since half the Dynast's power is absent, escorting his annual shipment downriver, the masters of house Maheka probably aren't even here, being out securing positional advantages. That's the only way they can counter Ragara's wife, a Water aspect, arriving at the markets first and therefore commanding a better price."

I looked at Angel. "Don't you love how we established all that so quickly?" I asked blandly.

"I certainly feel quite productive," she agreed.

Dog sighed. "Ragara wanted information out of us, but attempted to extract it in the bowels of his estate with only two servants. Clearly, he suspected someone in his own men. But since we haven't been immediately let into house Maheka, either his precautions worked, or information from the Mahekan spies hasn't disseminated through the estate. Since we know they couldn't have been too successful given how subtle we weren't, therefore the Mahekan factor must be keeping a tight grip on how much he knows. He'd only play his cards so close to his own chest if he was paranoid, implying that Ragara has infiltrated his house as well, but more covertly. Since the dynasts of the realm are better at these games then the houses of the Seventh Legion, this makes sense. Still, Gens Maheka is a thousand miles closer then the Blessed Isle, which is why they have more soldiers then Ragara, who nearly depleted his personal guard to provide a proper escort for their cargo. His wife, a Pelep, is also escorting the barge through the floods of the first seasonal thaw, doubly implying she's a Water aspect. Whoever gets their cargo to market first gets the best price. That, combined with the immensity of the undertaking for Ragara, means he can only do this once a year. Hence the cargo is the entirety of their annual product, sold all at once for the best profit, but with the most risk. Again, why he sent the lion's share of his guard with it. Gens Maheka has to know this, but can't do anything about it because they probably don't have a Water aspect here. Still, they seem to be evenly balanced in the city, so they have to capitalize on Ragara's weakness somehow. A personal conflict is right out, but they could be sabotaging his supplies, hence why the coke was dirty, and securing more advantageous contracts. That's why more local merchants fly their colors, and more temples. Maheka has always been more religious then the Realm, especially Houses Ragara or Peleps, who are basically noble pirates." Dog thought for a few heartbeats, going over what he just explained to us in his head. "Not that complicated, really. Nothing implies who killed Ash Maiden, mind you."

I stared at Dog in silence, too nonplussed to speak. He did that to me from time to time. Angel was nodding as she followed along, finding his logical bridges solid in construction. Dog wasn't really paying attention to either of us, being more concerned with finding a comfortable seat on his rock.

"How does that help us get inside?" I asked.

"It doesn't, really. Not unless you can find one of Maheka's spies and show him your face. Then he would probably go running to his boss with stories about you, and you'd get an audience in no time. The attaché would also probably get fired, which is exactly the kind of petty revenge that suits one such as him."

"Dog, why must we always drag these things out of you?" asked Angel rhetorically. "Any ideas where we could find one of Maheka's agents?"

"Sure. Find whoever sells Maheka his coke. I'll bet rocks to riding horses that there's an agent of Maheka's there."

Angel and I exchanged glances, then considered the barred gate. "Is there anything more aggravating then a brilliant moron?" I asked her.

"Nothing springs to mind," she agreed demurely.

"Why am I a moron?" demanded Dog.

"You aren't. That's what's so aggravating," Angel informed him. "Let's go find out who sells Ragara his coke, shall we?"

That wasn't too hard. We looked around until we found a squat building in front of a fenced in yard piled high with coke. Neither House Ragara or Gens Maheka's colors flew above it, implying the owners plied their goods to anyone. Attached to the yard was a low pier that intruded into the river, about the right height to accept barges from upstream. The river Meander was sluggish here, and moved with little purpose as befitted its name. Dimly glimmering lights shone in the windows, and we let ourselves in the unlocked front door.

Inside was a small room with desks for three men, only one of which was occupied. A thin, white haired man of wasp-like features and bony hands was adding figures on a slate. Two large men who might have had "goon," "thug," or "bodyguard" written across their faces depending on the legality of their employ stood in the corner, comparing club size. The one on the left had a much bigger club, which the one on the right noted with bludgeon envy. All three looked up when we entered, and the scribe at the desk pushed back his chair so he could face us easier.

"Good evening," he welcomed us with professional courtesy. "How can I help you?"

I looked at Dog. Angel looked at Dog. Dog looked at me. I glanced from him to the secretary and back to him. "He's talking to you," I supplied helpfully.

"Oh, right. Good evening," watching realization dawn on Clockwork Dog's face was like the gears he was named for coming to alignment. "I'm the representative of a small operation upriver, where we've struck an amazingly vital vein of anthracite coal. We'd been digging for gold, you understand, but are not in the habit of ignoring the bounty of the earth."

"Yes, the Earth Dragon will award great wonders on those who deserve it," the scribe agreed in a tone to correct Dog of improperly allocating gratitude.

"Of course. We who follow Pesiap's example by working in the Earth always have always been grateful for his generosity. Still, we have quite a bit of good, fine anthracite and no market for it, being as it is that it isn't what we were originally looking for. We were wondering if that was something you would like to discuss?"

"Of course," the scribe assented. "I'm always interested in discussing matters of business with one who holds closely to the great truths of the Immaculate Faith. So few of these locals have elevated themselves from their crude animism even in the light of our evangelism."

Mentally I braced myself. I was exhausted and low on patience, and this was going to require more then had on hand. Angel had already gone to the two goons. Proudly, the one on the left showed her his club.

"The question is, do you know how to use that?" she asked sweetly.

"I am Serenading Thrush," the scribe introduced himself to Dog. He didn't look like he'd ever serenaded anything. "Please, have a seat."

Clockwork Dog did so, pulling a chair away from one of the other desks. "My backers are not aware that I'm here right now, and I'd like to keep it that way," he began. "So with your permission, I'd like to refrain from using my real name. They can be so intrusive some times."

"I understand," the wizened scribe agreed. "What shall I call you then?"

"Fuzzy Puppy," Dog replied after a pause like he was searching for a pseudonym. "This is my scribe, Fluffy Bunny, who will take notes during our discussion," he continued, indicating me. "Could you extend to him supplies for the evening?" Our host indicated them on the desk with a grandiose wave.

I stared at Dog, trying to murder him with my smile. I could write about twenty words, one them being my name, and the rest being the names of my close friends. Instead I sat at his right hand and readied a piece of parchment and a quill pen.

"You understand that our discussion is, of course, non-binding to my employers?" Serenading Thrush confirmed.

"Do you think I shall sign a contract under the name 'Fuzzy Puppy?'" asked Dog amused. "What Magistrate shall I take it to for enforcement?"

"Indeed," replied the other.

They then began some rather intense bargaining, made all the more impressive that Dog had no product with which to sell. I made cryptic marks on parchment and pretended they were a personal shorthand. Angel flirted with the guards, admired their clubs, and demonstrated how she liked to polish them. She seemed intent on a long, slow stroking club-polishing motion. After the long demonstration, the one with the shorter club began to flush and had to leave. The other kept asking questions and tried to arrange a period of personal instruction on the topic. I kept hoping lightning would pierce the roof and kill me, that I wouldn't have to hear either discussion. No such luck was forthcoming.

Sometime later, we left. Dog walked purposely down a darkened road away from the yard while hissing under his breath, "Are we being followed?"

"What?" hissed back Angel.

"Are we being followed?" he hissed louder.

"Borrowed?" she asked.

"You're as beautiful as a marble goddess with hearing to match," muttered Dog. "Ending?"

"Not that I can tell," I replied. The remaining goon hadn't left the building and doubted the scribe had the vitality to flit from shadow to shadow. "Where to next?"

"That barn," he replied, indicating an abandoned out building behind a farm on the outskirts of town. We dashed across a field under the dim light of the obscured moon, and hid in rotting straw. Nothing moved.

"All right. We know the factor's dishonest," Dog explained. "If he isn't the one directly passing Ragara a bad product, he certainly isn't bothered by it."

"The guy who kept babbling religion?" I asked.

"No one's that pious without being a filthy skimmer," Dog replied.

"You know, I'm beginning to get the impression you aren't terribly fond of the Immaculate Faith," Angel observed. "Any reason for your disparaging comments other than religious disdain?"

"I basically told him I'm swindling my backers, and he didn't so much as bat an eye. It's a scheme in mining, where you sign a contract where the backers make all the money off a set commodity provided they put up the overhead for the operation. Since we allegedly found no gold, they get none of the profit off our coal sales," he explained. "It's a bait and switch, but a legal one. Anyway, he's crooked and posing behind false piety, which explains why he's willing to swindle a Dynast of the 'Isle.

"Besides, it allowed me to name drop the aliases we used on Ragara. If either he, or the guards, are in the employ of Maheka, they should get a message to him this evening. We have an appointment to show him some of our product first thing in the morning."

"And then someone takes us to Maheka?" I asked.

"No. It's almost certain that whichever of them runs to Maheka, another will run to Ragara, if not two. The only one who won't run to Ragara is the scribe, who's ripping him off in the first place."

"You should have been a politician," I told him.

"Gods, no. Just get this done and let me go back to my mountain," he replied.

"So how do we get in to see Maheka?" interrupted Angel. She didn't take well to scheming. It was outside her nature.

"I have no idea," Dog replied innocently. "I forgot that was what we were trying to do in the fun of figuring out who was working for who."

"Idiot!" hissed Angel.

"Why are you so mad?" asked Dog. "I thought The Ending was the psychotic impatient one?"

"I all but offered that thug a hand job because I thought you had a plan!" she snapped.

"Oh. I see," responded Dog. "Well, you don't have to give him one, of course."

I interrupted before she could beat him. "This isn't a problem. Serenading Thrush either works for Maheka or against Ragara. Either way, he can get us where we want to go. We wait until he's alone, and then we make him take us to Maheka. We'll just stalk him in the mean time."

With some grumbling, this was accepted by all. Sleep was almost upon me, and I could barely fight it off while sitting still. Therefore I suggested we creep back and watch for the scribe, who should be leaving soon. This was agreed upon, and we went.

I was wide awake again by the time we crouched down in the shadows between two gables of a steep roofed house by the docks. It was tiled with shale to better endure the howling snowstorms. We had to move carefully and take meticulous care to stand on the underlying beams less we crash through. At some point later, a figure entered the room. The figure was small, and probably female. Shortly after her arrival the lights went out. We all hissed at each other, but no one was asleep. Bent by age, the wizened old con left, escorted by his two bull-necked and bovine-brained bodyguards. The woman went with them. We followed them to a narrow townhouse. Lights came on upstairs, and in a small room by the front door.

"Now we break in," I concluded. This time they didn't argue with me.

Around the back of the row of clustered houses were small plots of land, fenced in and full of vegetables or chicken houses. Serenading Thrush had built his chicken coop directly against the back wall that the house would heat it in the winter. The roofs swept almost to the ground. Above that were wider windows with thick shutters, paned in with glass panels. None of the other houses had glass windows. These were dark on the second floor and barred. Above them was a bare wall, but above that were two small, narrow windows, also barred and shuttered, but lit from the inside. While we planned our incursion, one of the foundries across the town suddenly sent spires of flame into the sky. It's smoke stacks roared, and sent gouts of smoke into the dark air.

"It's the furnaces," Clockwork Dog surmised. "They've been cleaned. I also bet that Ragara Aino is personally overseeing the operation right now, driving the old machinery with his own power. If they had better fuel, they'd make excellent steel. As is, it will be good enough."

As the ash fall began to silently rain from the sky, darkening the night and filling our mouths with the taste of death, we stole down the row of houses until we found one dark and vacant. We broke in to find it was as deserted as promised. There were holes in the roof that let us atop the row of houses, each of which shared the roofline. Though the way was treacherous with crumbly soot falling like warm snow, we crept along on hands and knees. Eventually we counted seven chimneys, and were sure we stood almost above where Serenading Thrush slept. We exchanged a glance that explained everything. Mere mortals as we were, we had no powers that would enable us to silently intrude, and the kind of acrobatic nonsense required to move through a barred window was beyond us. Instead we listened carefully to the thin slates until we heard where Serenading Thrush was preparing himself for bed. I held up three fingers, removed one, removed another, and remove the third as we leaped in unison to come smashing down with locked knees on the roof.

It buckled. The tiles over spaces betwixt the beams shattered, dropping the three of us through the roof to an empty attic, the floor of which snapped like tinder beneath our sudden weights. Falling with a rain of splinters, we crashed into a frugal bedroom where Serenading Thrush was climbing into bed. Angel landed in the bed, broke the central beam, and the whole thing dropped six inches as the floor partially gave way, allowing the feet at all four corners through. The floor held the rest, except where Angel hit. There she was knee deep in feathers, while a naked screaming girl clutched the old geezer. Dog found himself landing on a end table that simply ceased to exist in any recognizable form. I broke a desk in half with my feet, nearly broke my ankles on the floor, and let my legs buckle until I crashed into his chair. I leaned back and let the legs break, dropping it six inches to the floor. I glanced under the desk, and saw a large, iron bound chest bolted to the floor and a wall. I kicked it a few times, and it made rattling noises.

"Evening, Serenading Thrush," I said lightly. "We have a bit more business to discuss."

The girl kept shrieking. Dog observed from the floor, "She's a young one for an old goat like you."

"What do you-"

"Shut up," I replied. "Now, I will speak, you will listen, and if you don't want me to start breaking her fingers, you'll shut the girl up as well."

"Do what you want with her!" cried Serenading Thrush. "The harlot means nothing to me."

"Business is hard, honey," observed Fall of Angels, extricating herself from the bed. "But that man right there is crazy. I'd stop making noises if he tells you too." The girl shut up. Her skin was white with fear, and she huddled under the blankets.

"Puppy, Kitten, the guards will be coming up. I think I hear them on the stairs. Deal with them," I ordered. Dog climbed to his feet and grabbed two table legs, one of which he passed to our comrade. She had finally gotten free of down and sheets, and they two of them stepped outside. I continued to regard the two in bed. "Now, you are going to answer some questions, and then take us to the house of Maheka, and you are going to get us in to see the man himself. The amount of bones we break of yours first is your discretion, as is the amount of your money we steal, and whether or not we also set your house on fire. Woman, stop whimpering, or I will stop you."

She stopped. Serenading Thrush looked at me with his eyes bugging out. On the landing outside, sounds of horrible, violent conflict erupted to the tune of wood splintering and men screaming. I never took my eyes off him, for all things considered, I still had no doubts who would win.

"Who _are_ you people?" he exclaimed, incredulous. He clearly couldn't believe what was happening.

"Fluffy Bunny," I replied. "He's Fuzzy Puppy. She's Cuddly Kitten. I'm about to break your legs, and drag you by your spleen to Maheka. Stop asking stupid questions."

The old man shut up. His hired companion for the night had finally got her breathing under control, and made no noise.

"Question one. Who killed Ash Maiden?"

"Who?"

"Don't answer a question with a question. It's rude," I told him. At that instant, with a horrific crash, one of the club-men entered the room via a plank wall. Only his head, shoulders, and chest made it through, unfortunately, because a moment later he was yanked back out. His gurgling suddenly went quiet. "Ash Maiden was the young lady who was found in the Meander fourteen days ago."

"I have no idea," the scared old goat pleaded.

"Are you lying to me?" I asked, rising from my seat. Outside the melee noises stopped.

"No!" he assured me with panic in his voice.

"Very well. You may take us to Maheka now." I turned, grabbed a robe off the floor, and tossed it too him. He stared putting it on in a panic. The girl was looking back and forth between us, scared and confused. I told her, "You are free to leave. Good bye." With that I grabbed the geezer, yanked him upright, and dragged him outside. Dog and Angel were standing on a pile of guards. They'd waylaid them each as they came up the stairs, and had used the height to compensate for Angel's lack of mobility and Dog's lack of skill in unmitigated violence. The two were sucking in air in deep gulps but looked unharmed. "We're leaving now."

"Good times, good times," gasped Dog.

"We're taking their swords," Angel told Serenading Thrush. "Unless you have a problem with that?"

"None at all!" he assured her.

"Good."

I lead the troop downstairs. Once in the street, we walked away from the house as neighbors looked from open windows and called out questions. They could see nothing in the pitch blackness of skies covered in smoke, and in this part of town no one had the money to waste candles. The sole light was the window leading to Serenading Thrush's room behind us, were the slim figure of the hired girl watched us go. Gently flakes of ash fell around us like burned snow.

No one interfered along our route through the city. When we came to the gate, we shoved our captive at the guards. "Tell them we're the ones who burned Ragara's house down. Tell them we want to see Maheka, and we have a business proposition for him."

"They'll never let us in!" he complained.

"Then we'll be stuck out here, with nothing to do. And I remember where your place is, where your money is, and where we may as well go back to until we can steal enough to bribe our way into an audience with Maheka," I replied.

"I'll see what I can do," he assured me. With that he hurried to the guards, and started talking animatedly. He was waving his arms and yelling. Two guards were dealing with him while two others and four on the wall kept close eyes on the three of us. They had bows and seemed familiar with their use.

After a few minutes, the guards came to us. "We're taking you to meet with Maheka Aino," they told us. "Don't try to resist."

"Dear child, that's the last thing on our minds," Angel assured them. They drew up around us, and marched us through the portcullis. Dog waved politely to Serenading Thrush as we walked past. The old goat was looking at us like a sleeper who couldn't wake up from a horrible dream. As we passed inside, he suddenly realized he was free and ran off into the night with wild cackles testifying to his joy at being alive.

Maheka Aino didn't go for staggering ostentation quite like Ragara Aino did. His mansion was opulent to be sure, but the numerous mosaics were of religious significance instead of self aggrandizement. I suppose that humility in religion is easy when the religion tells you you're the apex of Creation, but I gave him points for trying. The walls and floor were well laid granite, intricately carved with designs and mandalas. All five elements repeated, though earth symbols were most common. More subtly displayed, his wealth was apparent in well crafted doors and rooms, a plethora of guards and servants that wore the best in armor and livery, and imported flatware and exotic fruits in baskets. Everything was amazingly functional, but no more expensive the best need be. His candelabra held candles, and lit his halls with warm light, but were made of fine steel, not gold inset with jade.

In time, we stopped in a formal receiving room. The guards handed us over to other guards, who bid us take seats in the sumptuously apportioned chairs. They were comfortable yet supportive. I thought I was seated on a cloud. The floor was tiled in blue, white, and brown, and showed towering mountains rising from the earth. Diamond stars sat in the ebony ceiling, laid in the shape of familiar constellations. In time, Maheka Aino arrived.

He was not so broad as Ragara Aino. Though they were each majestically build, Maheka's eyes had less charm and more intelligence. His fingers were narrow and dexterous, lacking Ragara's calluses. They had the same dark complexions, and calm demeanors. Dressed in a crimson and green evening robe, he looked like he'd just awoken but was still clear headed. He offered us wine and refreshment, which we politely declined, accepting only coffee for the sake of etiquette. It was a dark and potent beverage, full bodied. Every sip woke us up, and filled us with vigor.

"Now, my guests, I've been told you three claim to be the individuals who did such disrespect to Ragara Aino in his own home," he told us after our needs had been fulfilled. "Furthermore, you broke into the house of Serenading Thrush, one of my suppliers, accosted his men, and took him captive that he could get you an appointment to see me. You've broken virtually every law we have written down, and numerous unwritten ones no one has lacked the common sense to require committing to paper. Who are you, and what brings you before me?"

"I'm Fuzzy Bunny," I said. "He's Fluffy Puppy. She's Cuddly Kitten. Who killed Ash Maiden?"

"Who is this 'Ash Maiden?' Was she Exalted?" he asked.

"She was the young woman who a dock worker found drifting in the Meander fourteen days ago. She was beautiful and kind, and one of the best people to ever be born in Highmere. We want to know who killed her," I explained.

"Highmere? Is that a district of Nexus?"

"It's a village several days run from here in the mountains," Angel informed him.

"So she was a Fae noble? A local princess? The governor?" the terrestrial asked, trying to find a deeper meaning to our question that wasn't there.

"She was a young woman from a poor family. Her mother got sick with the consumption, so they sent her away so she would be safe. Her fiancée was supposed to follow her, but stayed behind to make sure that his mother-in-law to be was buried safely." It wasn't easy to admit she'd had a fiancée and to acknowledge that it wasn't me.

"Wait," interrupted our host. "This was a mortal? And a poor mortal at that?"

"Yes," Clockwork Dog replied simply.

Maheka Aino lost his composure as for a brief instant he stared at us like he'd been assailed by a sorcerous talking weasel intent on finding who stole his favorite mouse tail. As awareness blossomed within in him that we were doing all this for the sole purpose of discovering a mortal, and that for that reason his illustrious Dragon-Blooded sleep was being disturbed, his face gradually turned astonishing shades of red and white until it settled into a deadly calm.

"I do not know. Not only do I not know, but I do not care. Your concerns are so far beneath me that I care less for the murder of one of my favorite mousers then I do for this Ash Woman. I thought you were here because you were powerful enough to assault Ragara in his own home, and set fire to it when you escaped."

"We did," Angel said perfectly levelly. "He didn't care about Ash Maiden either."

There was something in her voice that stopped his automatic dismissal of our concern. For the first time the veils of sleep truly lifted from Maheka's eyes. Now he looked at us not as mortals, but as men given utterly to a terrible purpose without restraint. Angel suddenly appeared on his playing field as a dangerous force that could assail powers vastly greater than her own simply through desperation and wild abandon. Maheka considered us calmly, as was his nature, before he answered. "I do not know who killed her, nor for what reason. But for a price, I can find out."

"Price is no object," I replied evenly.

"I'm not talking about money," he informed me. "Clearly, I have enough, and greatly doubt any meager financial remuneration you could offer me would significantly affect my fiscal stature. But if you have the will to enter my service, I have ways for you to earn my aid."

"Lord Maheka, I understand you're a business man, or business Dynast, or whatever it is you call yourself, and to you haggling comes as easy as breath. Let me be simple. I don't care. I don't care about your prices, your services, or you tasks. None of that matters to me, because none of it is what killed Ash Maiden. This what will happen. You will find out who killed her. You will then tell us. We will then go off and deal with it. The rest is meaningless detail. Do you understand?"

"That rudeness borders on treason, something I am perfectly vested and capable of dealing with myself," Maheka replied ominously.

"Yes, but you won't," Dog replied. He sighed with the same show of weariness he had when explaining the political-economic situation of Nibeldamt to us. "Ragara tried. It didn't work so well for him. The ensuing fight left his mansion on fire, and his affairs disrupted. Right now you're in a position to seize that advantage, precisely because none of what happened to him has happened to you. What we're offering you is that we won't happen to you, leaving you in a marvelously better bargaining stance than you were in this time yesterday. In exchange, tell us who killed Ash Maiden. It couldn't be simpler."

"In fact, we've already paid you our end of the bargain. All up front with no negotiations," Angel supplied. "You can't get better terms than that."

"Are you threatening me?" asked Maheka astonished. That we had gone beyond common insolence to this boggled his mind. I don't think he'd ever been threatened by mortals before.

"Yes," we replied in unison. We were getting better about that. It came much more naturally now.

"I should kill you right now," he exclaimed and started to rise.

"Sit down, Lord Maheka," ordered Angel, her voice dropping down to a deep, subdued menace. "You'll kill one of us to be sure. Possibly two, and if you're very lucky, all three. But right now you're here with us, and I swear to all the Forgotten Gods that you will not walk out of this room alive should blades be drawn." When she spoke her voice crackled as powers far outside the ken of mortal men took notice of her oath and sanctified it.

"The only way we can win against you," Dog explained. "Is to take this to a level you're not willing to follow. You have wealth. You have money. You have security. We have nothing but an unconditional need to see a murderer found. Lord, we make no pretensions that we're you're equal, but you aren't a great power capable of smashing us with impunity, or else you wouldn't be in a piss-ant little town like Nibeldamt, and you certainly would have overcome Ragara by now. So just tell us what we want to know, and we'll go away, and you can reap the harvest of the whirlwind we've already sown in the manor of Ragara Aino."

Maheka glanced at Angel, then at Dog, and finally at me. "You spoke a great deal at the beginning, but now have fallen silent. Do you understand that your companions are bargaining your life away?"

"Yes," I replied with a soft smile.

"You aren't a power like they are," he told me, looking deep into my eyes and letting his will bore into mine. "You know I could kill you. You know the certainty of your fate." His mind was like an avalanche, crashing against me with will greater than mortal minds possess. Pure Essence raged against my sanity and sought to bend me into submission. "I'll put you to sleep forever," he assured me and let all his power howl through the silent doorways of my mind.

I leaned forward as well and met his glare. "It would be a pleasure," I replied, and the force he brought to bear smashed against the truth of the statement.

Maheka sat back, baffled at his lack of success. He truly did not understand why we didn't submit to his will. Never in his experience had he met mortals such as we, cushioned as he'd always been by those so overwhelmed at his innate greatness that they'd affirmed his domination in their thought and deed. He just didn't understand us. His consternation slowly gave way to thoughtfulness, which gently slid into amusement as he cracked a wide smile, and leaned back in his chair.

"You know, mortals, I will give you credit. I honestly never expected to have such a conversation, much less in my home. I'm rather impressed. So much so, in fact, that I'm curious to see what you would do next. Are you brave, crazy, or stupid? I imagine I'll find out soon enough." Once he had found his calm again, even buffeted by our tension, he was like a rock, and impassive as the ancient hills. "The woman in the river was named Ash Maiden? I didn't know that. Nor what happened to her." His voice as solid as old rocks.

Wry thoughts of caution told me this sudden change of tact was dangerous. While I was trying to figure out what angle he was playing Dog asked, "What about Frozen Thane? What do you know of him?"

"The Ice Walker?" replied Maheka curiously. He cocked his head at the apparent non-sequitur. "Very little. He has avoided the steel industry, so I ignored him. The only reason I know the name is about a month ago someone came to me looking for him. She said I could make a significant profit by handing him over. Still, it sounded like a private matter so I stayed out of it. Getting involved in private feuds does me no good." The last he said archly, indicating the three of us and our situation with his eyes.

"Who came looking for him?" Angel asked.

"Some woman from the north. She said her name was Defile Perilous; most likely a pseudonym. She had very pale skin, almost white blue lips. Attractive in an icicle way. She sounded emotional," he pronounced the adjective scornfully. "And there's no reason to get between two Ice Walkers. She probably had two of his kids and then he ran out on her."

"Where can we find her?" she pressed.

"I have no idea," the scion of Maheka replied. "As I said, I stay out of such affairs."

Before either of the rest of us could answer, Dog thanked Maheka for his help. "It's been wonderful meeting you, and I am amazed at the grace of your house. Now, if we'll be leaving. I hope we can maintain our cordial terms long enough for the three of us to depart without having to burn anything down?"

Maheka raised one eyebrow. "That's it?"

"Unless you'd like us to stay for crumpets," Dog replied. We all rose, following his lead.

"One question. Which of you burned Ragara's house down?"

"We did," I replied, indicating myself and Clockwork Dog. "But it was his idea."

Maheka laughed and shook his head. "You must be stupid. Maybe crazy, but definitely stupid. Good bye, children. Do not come to see me again."

"Aw, does this mean we can't be buddies?" asked Angel.

"No."

We departed. A butler and a small horde of personal guards escorted us outside, and firmly locked the front gate behind us. Silhouetted by candle light, Maheka Aino watched us depart from a tower window. Once we were off his property, Dog bowed fluidly, and we hastened into Nibeldamt.

"So, what did you learn?" I asked him once we were under cover.

"Maheka's a liar, and Defile Perilous works for Ragara. At least Maheka wants us to think she does. Now that I think about it, the bruises on Ash Maiden's throat could have been made by a woman, though she would have been abnormally strong," Dog summarized.

"Might I ask-" I began.

"Maheka claims he never gets involved in personal feuds. Our feud is as personal as it gets, and he spoke to us. Especially given he let us in to see him the first time because we mentioned what we'd done to his competition. Afterwards he made a point to mention the northwoman, and imply he didn't involve himself. That's a hint Ragara did." Dog cut me off, getting to the point quickly. We were training him so well.

"So we go back to Mansion Ragara and do more violence upon him," I surmised. "That works for me."

"Not necessarily," Angel argued. "Maheka could be trying to manipulate us into just that. He only gains when we make trouble for Ragara."

"She has a point," Dog agreed with her. "This one didn't underestimate us nearly as badly as Ragara did. He might well be using us as disposable mercenaries, made all the better because he hasn't paid us anything. This is a good deal for him, and he knows it."

"And we have only his word that this 'Defile Perilous' is in any way connected with Frozen Thane, and through him Ash Maiden," Angel continued. "No one else has mentioned her."

"Oh. Damn." My simplistic plan of action fell apart before me.

"You must be tired," Dog observed. "Otherwise you wouldn't have missed that."

"I haven't been sleeping well," I understated. From there I changed the topic. "So all that was a waste?"

"Not a waste. We learned a great deal. Maheka's usable. He's willing to play the game to get what he wants, but he's a very cagey player. Should this lead about the ice walker woman pan out, we can probably rely on him to be consistently dishonest so long as it works for him. In addition, if we find ourselves in a bind, he might help us for the right price," Dog concluded.

"Not bad for pushing a bluff." Angel sounded pleased with herself. Her voice patted us all on the back.

"Pushing a bluff?" I asked.

"Ending, my leg is still all but broken, and walking without limping was damn near killing me. I wasn't talking like that because I was threatening him, but because my entire left side is in agony. And isn't your hand still broken?" she responded.

To be honest, I hadn't thought about it. "Yes, but Shogg stopped the bleeding."

"Maheka might well have been capable of putting all three of us down at once without too much of a problem. I have to admit, though, when you told him you it would be a pleasure to die, that was one of the best bits of acting I've seen. That probably tipped the balance in favor of dealing with us over fighting."

"Right," I agreed. "Acting."

They looked at me strangely.

"Let's get some sleep," Dog concluded. "It's been a long day."

That was the one thing I really didn't want to do, but couldn't convince them otherwise. Soon enough we found a deserted shack on the outskirts of town. Wrapped in our thick cloaks, we bedded down on dusty piles of rusted farm equipment. After they were snoring, I watched the door, playing mind games with myself to stay awake. In time I lost.

In silver moonlit fields of waving wheat high above the clouds that boiled against the mountains like a frothy sea I walked with a girl I'd just met. Here and there the obsidian shards of Jaggerfall's great towers lanced above the mists far below us. On this meadow only the resilient blue wheat could grow. Even the lichens of lower altitudes couldn't cling to the stones. But the azure seed heads beat against my thighs in the relentless winds, reminding me that something survived here. I had just come to Highmere with my master, and the girl was the first person I'd met.

"Why don't you like talking about your past?" she had asked me. Her hair was the color of sunshine.

"Why don't you like talking about your name?" I countered. It was hard to keep track of what was the dream, and what was a memory.

"I don't like it much," she admitted. "It sounded nice, but the more I think about it, the less I like it."

"It's a beautiful name. It's quiet, but mysterious," I told her.

"What good comes from ashes?" she pouted. "Nothing. Ash is what's left over when good things burn up."

"Well, at least you still have the maiden part," I retorted, flicking her lower lip. It completely ruined her attempt at looking petulant, and she knew it. In retaliation she stopped ignoring my disinclination to answer her first question.

"So, where did you live before you came here?" she probed.

"Somewhere else."

"Why did you leave?"

"To come here."

"Are you going to stay here?" she continued, refusing to either rise to the bait or be distracted.

"I might," I replied.

"Don't you like it here?" she asked.

"I like you."

She flushed and looked off over the mountains. Ash Maiden had never been good at taking compliments. "Then don't leave," she concluded simply. Wisps of gold hair entangled themselves in her lips and caught there. "Because if you like me, you won't leave me."

"Ending, dogs," whispered Angel in a sharp voice. She hadn't been there at the meadow. I hadn't even met her until much later. I twisted to look at her, and I saw her in ash covered clothes underneath a dirty sky. Franticly I looked away like a twisted Orpheus, but Ash Maiden was gone, and only Clockwork Dog was there, watching the street from a broken window. In the distance the howls of hounds echoed across the murky sky. The sun couldn't shine through the soot.

"Joy, the waking world," I lamented quietly. "How many, how far?"

"At least two. Maybe as many as six. I can't hear people. If they're after us, we need to leave."

"Of course they're after us," Dog interjected.

"Then we leave," I agreed with Angel. I stretched the kinks out of my back, and got ready to run. She had already packed up everything we had.

"What's the point?" Dog asked. "We can't outrun bloodhounds."

"Actually, we can," I disagreed. "It's hard, but possible. And if we can't do that, we can beat the dog handlers. But we need to go."

Dog and Angel exchanged another glance, identical to one I'd exchanged with Angel not a day before. She asked, "Are you sure about this?"

"Trust me," I replied. "Now hurry."

We broke from cover and raced down a street. The wind was coming from the east, over the river, which suited my purpose just fine. We went upwind to the docks, plunged into the water icy cold with glacial runoff, and swam downstream. In the water our filthy cloaks pulled us down, and we shucked them. By the time we made it to the far bank, my muscles were cold and tired. We scaled the steep bank, and put some distance between us and the town.

Our lead had stretched to perhaps three hours when we saw several rowboats laden with men and hounds punt across the fast flowing river. We were going north along the line of a ridge, letting the wind come from the side and blow most of our scent away. While the baying grew louder from behind us, we gained elevation until my temples throbbed like nails piercing towards my brain. Once on the ridge line we fled, always seeking a harder path. A two foot step was tiring for us, but would force a bloodhound to detour. By the time the posse broke open terrain and stood silhouetted against the sky, we were miles ahead, running down a gorge. The wind tore up past us, hurling along until it merged with the open sky. High cross winds caught it there, daubing traces of it against the mountain tops.

Not far down the gorge was a shadowed patch of snow, protected from the burning sun by a naked stone arrat. On the far side, another ridge climbed back into the sky, while small creeks of snow melt collected around its edges, flowing downhill. We followed one down until it entered a defile like the one we'd just quit before doubling back and heading to the ridge. Once there, the wind came from the other side of the mountain. We left a second false path plunging into a ravine where the wind shrieked downhill. It would carry our scent far below, where the gorge opened up onto an alpine meadow. The trackers would need to take the hounds all the way down to be sure we hadn't gone that way. Meanwhile, on the ridge top, we chose shoulders and prominences that lead us always into the wind, walking on rock as much as possible. It was exhausting, made worse because we had no water or food.

This far from Nibeldamt the clouds of smoke ended, letting sunlight finally through. Our clothes dried in the powerful winds of the high mountains. While we saved most of our breath for the run, occasionally one of us would point out some natural feature that rose in stark isolation against the sky. No people lived here, few animals, and the plants that could endure fought against the environment in a perpetual struggle. When the sun was directly over head we looked back and couldn't see any of our pursuit.

"Think we lost them?" Angel asked.

"No. The handlers are resting their beasts. They should have brought food and water for all. But they can't afford to waste too much time, because even a bloodhound's nose will lose a trail after a while." I scanned the sky, hoping for traces of rain which would well and truly finish our pursuit. There were none.

"Food and water would be good for us too," Dog observed. "This high up the dry air will suck the moisture from our bodies."

"I know. I'm thinking," I replied.

"Ending, can we really outrun bloodhounds?" Angel asked. The strain was cracking her composure, letting doubts seep to the surface.

I looked at her, then sat down for a breather. "If you're going to beat a dog team, you do one of three things. Beat the dog, beat the handler, or beat the handler's trust of the dog. If you can, you do all three. Every false path we leave means the dogs have to check a little further then we go. In addition, some of the animals will be fooled, and some won't. The handlers see the division in the pack and think they're losing the trail, and then the humans get tempted to override the dogs' noses. People will start arguing. Animals will get weary. As long as we give them no reinforcement, they're lose morale slowly. Plus, in the mountains, the rocks will hurt the pads of a dog's foot, making it go slowly and pick its way. The handlers can't go ahead, and when the going is easy, the dog's are held back to the pace of their two footed companions."

"But can it really work?" Dog asked. "A bloodhound can follow a trail that's weeks old. Even all this will only delay the inevitable."

"I'm here, aren't I?" I shrugged. "This isn't the first time someone's sicked dogs on me."

"You didn't lead a very honest life before coming to Highmere, did you?" he observed.

"And you lead one where you rubbed elbows with Dynasts," I countered. "Listen, this isn't a battle of wits or wills. It's just stamina. If we can keep going long enough, they will lose our scent. All we need to do is keep leaving false trails and running."

"Terrestrials," Dog corrected me absently. Still, he rose and stretched. With a smile and a shrug he added, "All right then, let's go."

"Ending, I've been chased by dogs too," Angel said softly. "It didn't work out so well for me."

"This time it will," I assured her. I pointed at a neighboring ridge. "Now we'll head to that patch of snow there. We can drink some of the melt."

At the next juncture we split and left false trails across two ridgelines and down a cut. Choosing to head downwind, we actually followed the nastiest ridgeline, leading to high crags filled with hollows that the wind would saturate with our scent. We broke off suddenly and took a goat trail down that kept the wind at our backs. Hopefully our pursuers wouldn't be able to tell our scent wasn't just pushed down by the wind until they had to back track. At the bottom of the goat trail, we found a tiny stream. It was big enough to slake our thirsts and little more. Small berries grew in bunches along the waterway, but none of us recognized them. We didn't eat to the complaints of our empty stomachs.

While we rested, the winds carried the echoes of baying hounds across the mountains. The dells seemed filled with phantom hunting packs, and they called to each other across the open sky. We grew quiet for a moment, listening.

"They're calling to their own echoes," Dog suddenly concluded. "They don't know it's the sound of their own barking thrown back at them."

"How far?" Angel asked.

"Maybe a mile. Maybe less," he judged.

Our lead had been cut to less than half, in spite of my precautions. I wanted to swear, but couldn't waste the breath. "Come on. I have a few tricks left up my sleeve."

Giving up any pretense of subtlety, we raced down a rocky shoulder, keeping off the crest. The pack behind us was baying loudly. Confused animals were crying at the rocks, while their masters tried to make sense of dog cries. We skirted the edge of the snow field to open grass, heading upwind. That plunged into a narrow dell, shadowed by the lofty peaks in the evening. We made it to the bottom by the time the posse sorted out our false trails. Once they started down, our scent would be plain as day, but there was no help for that. They were too close for tricks.

"These guys are good," I judged.

"Yeah. It's almost like we angered someone with enough money to hire the best trackers," Dog wryly quipped.

"Who would do such a thing?" Angel asked, seeming shocked.

"Bad people," I told her. "Bad people who would set fire to the grass. Let them breath smoke."

Without a word, Clockwork Dog pulled out his flint and steel. Angel and I grabbed dry grass and shredded it. Soon we had a bed of tinder, and caught sparks. It began to smolder, then sizzle, and soon tiny licks of flame emerged from their dry nest to feed on the wild grass around. The winds kissed the fire, building it up, until smoke spread out from where we stood in an expanding half circle. It spread up and down the mountain side, hemmed by the rocks above and snow filled shadows below. The trackers came around a corner and spotted us, but between us was a racing blaze. They turned and fled, chased in turn by a grass fire.

"Oddly fitting, to use fire to deter pursuit by men hired by a crimson dragon," Dog observed with detached amusement. We set off again. Angel's limp was coming back. It had faded for a while when we first set out, but the reprieve granted her by a night's sleep was wearing off. In spite of the success of the fire gambit, I began to worry.

Our dell was a cleft between two ridges, each topped with stony spines. Neither was snow capped but would retain snow in patches until late summer where the shoulders blocked the sun, and left deep shadows year round. The patch above us was melting as the wildfire swept around it, pouring water down across burnt terrain. Only the roots of the grass remained. I stared around for a while, then looked at my companions. Speckled with grime, they were resolute. All of us were exhausted. We looked beaten in body. Still, there was no trace of resignation or despair. Dog only worried about Angel, and she would accept my words. If necessary, she'd run herself to death. The dirty water of the river Meander mixed with soot from the foundries, and tattooed us like mad savages. The image was apt.

I cocked my head, and watched the smoke blow in the wind. It raced east, both the way we came, and down the dell, towards lower ground. The snowfield was still melting above us.

"Come on. I have another idea."

We buried ourselves in dirty snow. It was loosely covered in soot from the grass fire, turning the surface opaque. I piled snow on Dog and Angel, and then entombed myself. Our smell must have been mostly ash and sweat, hopefully overshadowed by the fire. I thought the hounds might lose our scent, and seek down the dell, searching for us in a false path like the many we'd left before. Besides, it would be dark soon. The hounds would need to sleep.

Not long after we had hidden ourselves, we heard the tentative howls of the dog teams. They approached after the fires blew out, and searched the burn sight for a while. We stayed still, waiting. Eventually, they headed away, and the sounds of dog and man faded.

We broached the surface, busting upwards into twilight. There was no one around. Short smiles were exchanged, and then we fled back uphill. The stone spine of the ridge carried us downwind, and the setting sun lit the world in garish relief. Once it sank below the far reaches of Creation, we marched by starlight. Three hours later we finally curled up in a pile and slept like the dead.

Dawn broke. Pieces of it went everywhere. I dragged myself from the huddle and into the cold morning air. Behind me, Dog was curled into a ball, while Angel lay draped across him, gnawing on the back of his head in her sleep. We'd eaten nothing since the berries Shogg had provided, and that was days ago. With luck the trackers would be just setting out to reacquire our trail, and they wouldn't find it until noon. My sleep had not been dreamless, and being active provided me some relief from recalling the nocturnal visions. I scavenged for roots and edible flowers, and by the time the others awoke had three small piles ready. They would digest slowly, giving us the feeling of being full for hours. We drank snow melt, and stared off into the mountains, watching the morning sun on the clouds.

"What's the plan? Another day of running through the mountains?" Dog asked.

"No point in that," I admitted. "Sooner or later trackers will realize they don't need to follow us. They know where we're going, and can just wait for us back at Nibeldamt."

"So, what next?" Dog reiterated.

"We go to Nibeldamt first," Angel answered before I could. "We've left enough fake trails to keep them occupied while we make a mad dash for the city. Once we get there we find Frozen Thane, and ask him questions about Defile Perilous and Ash Maiden. Both Ragara and Maheka are stonewalling us, maybe the Ice Walker will spill some information." Clearly she and I were thinking the same way.

"Shouldn't we go hide somewhere and lick our wounds?" Dog suggested.

"That's just what they expect us to do," I declined.

"Because that's the only plan that isn't stupid," Dog rebutted.

I shrugged. Angel looked off into the distance, distracted by the interplay of light and shadow across the naked stone of the mountains. "There's food in town. Water too. We need that," she said absently.

"Anything else is just a distraction," I told him. "Ragara knows we'll be back. The longer we wait, the more chance we give his wife and their personal army to return. Time is against us."

"But we're half dead!" Dog exclaimed. "Angel, you can't walk! I haven't seen Ending use his right hand in two days. You shattered every bone in your hand when you hit him, and his jaw healed almost instantly. We can't hurt this guy!" Desperation that Dog had been keeping at bay through willpower alone was getting the best of him, working its insidious damage when he was weak with hunger. "What can we do?"

"What can we do now?" I asked very softly, keeping my voice low in an attempt to make him lower his own. "What if we find out Ragara actually did it? What if it's his fault, and we need to kill him? What then?"

"What if his wife is stronger than he is?" Angel continued. "What if we can't finish his until she returns, and they put an army between them and us, equipped better than we are, better fed, better armed, and outnumber us twenty to one? What then, Dog?"

"I don't know!" he lamented. "I don't know what to do. I can't figure out any way we win."

Angel rose and walked over to him. He was perched on a small rock with his head in his hands, exhausted. Sinking down beside him, Angel wrapped one of her arms over his shoulders and pulled him gently against her. Dog didn't resist.

"Dear, we knew the odds to begin with. We knew we were up against forces so far beyond us we aren't even playing the same sport. We knew this," she reminded him softly.

"I don't think I can watch you die," he responded quietly. "I can go myself, but I can't watch you get beaten to death."

"You always were more compassionate," I told him. I slid over until I was sitting with the two of them, making a visible show solidarity. "Angel is brave. I'm just a maniac."

"Determined, Ending. You're the determined one," Angel chided me.

"But what can we do against that? Against terrestrials?" Dog asked.

"Whatever we have to," I answered. "We find our strengths, and their weaknesses. Maheka never would have spoken to us if we'd played his game, but he did. We find a way to make ourselves greater, and hit them while they're weak. Besides, we don't even know if Ragara did it. Maybe he just knows something. We won't fight him if we don't have to."

Dog sat very still for a long time, his palms pressed against his head. Finally he looked up at us. He stared at Angel, and then said to me, "Fine. I'll follow you to the end, till we find Bright Leaf's truth in your name. I said I would, and I will keep that word. But if we have to fight one of them again, I go first. I can't watch, if there's nothing I can do against the Dynast."

"That's very brave," Angel told him.

"Not really," he denied. "I'm more scared of watching you get hurt than dying."

"There're two ways to deal with fear," she explained. "You're taking the noble one. Don't be ashamed of fear, because that just means you're sane. Even if it feels like it emasculates you, don't worry, for we feel the same."

"He doesn't," Dog argued, but there was a touch of his own self in his words. He indicated me with his head as he spoke.

"Well, I said fear means you're sane," Angel replied urbanely. "We don't accuse The Ending of sanity very often."

"I think I'm insulted," I observed without feeling it. For a moment I thought I would have to do this without him, and that did frighten me.

"The truth hurts," Dog replied. With a grunt, he rose and shook himself like his namesake. "Whatever. Let's get on with it."

"After that touching display of affection, I'm almost ashamed to interrupt," interjected a new voice. Our heads snapped towards the east, where a man stood. He'd come from the direction of the sun, hidden by the dawn's light. Now he stood on a rock, outlined against a white sky. Dirty leather pants were tucked into dirty leather boots, under a shirt of dirty leather. He had a wide sun hat, and a short, light sword rode on his hip. Across his back was a bow and a quiver of hunting arrows. His beard was scraggly and unkempt, and couldn't be determined from his hair. Oddly, it had a natural look to it, down brown like tree bark. His eyes were a piercing green, that showed none of the disregard of his outwards appearance. When he spoke he showed his teeth, pure white, also presenting a contrast to his filthy appearance. "But I must. I've been hired by the town of Nibeldamt to arrest you three, so that's why I'm here."

"On what charges?" Dog snapped. There was some fire in him again.

"The murder of Serenading Thrush," he replied.

"We never hurt him!" I retorted.

"I don't care," the mountain man replied. "But you're under arrest all the same."

"And what if we don't go willingly?" Angel asked very softly in her impending murder voice.

"Then we do this the fun way, the way your compatriot just tearfully admitted he didn't want to see," the tracker replied. With a grin, he drew his short heavy blade. "I'm taking you in, but if we have to wait until the others finally get past that maze of false trails you left, you don't have to walk. I'll happily put you down so you can't walk."

Angel rose as well, and fluidly slipped the sword she'd taken from Serenading Thrush's guard from its sheath. She put Dog behind her and stepped into a guard stance.

"You carry his weapons, and yet you protest your innocence?" he asked. "Well, at least that will ease my conscience."

"My name is Fall of Angels. Neither I nor my two companions has injured Serenading Thrush in anyway, for I have been with them every moment since I saw him alive and free. But I will not go willingly."

"Angel, please," interrupted Dog. "Don't make me watch this."

"Don't worry," she replied. "I think I can take one mountain man." Without further word, they came together.

The crash of steel on steel rocked the mountains, and waves of sound ricocheted from the peaks. The mountaineer was fast and elusive, while Angel could barely move, forced to fight statically by her bad leg. But their blades whipped back and forth, tracing patterns of sparks in the morning air. Their weapons whistled like songbirds. Finally her attacker tumbled backwards and rolled out of range.

"God, woman," he exclaimed as he got to his feet. Were she healthy he never would of made it, but now Angel listed to her right when she stood, favoring her back leg.

"If you leave now, we won't chase you," she told him. "We bear you no grudge."

"No, I don't think so," he replied, carefully getting to his feet. "I won't suffer three murderers to escape."

"We didn't kill him," I said. "When he left us at the gates of Maheka's mansion, he was hale and healthy. The guards will tell you that."

"And after you left house Maheka you strangled him and dumped him in the river," the tracker countered. "You broke into his house and found his strong box the first time, and then you forced the secret of opening it from him before you killed him. You've even got his weapons."

"Then why would we have strangled him?" interjected Dog. "We would have just run him through."

"I don't know. But I also don't care," he replied.

"Was he strangled by a woman?" I suddenly asked. Pieces were falling together in my head.

"Probably her, to cover her tracks," he replied.

"No, not her. But a woman would have small hands," I replied.

"Whatever that means," the tracker dismissed my statement. "But I'm not going to let you keep murdering people, regardless of whether you're greedy or crazy. You're coming with me, now."

"No," Angel replied. "We're not. And you're going to need to be much better than that to take us."

The tracker smiled. "Much better? Very well then. My name is Beast of the Oak Forest. And while you may know a celestial form, child, skill only does so much without power behind it. Let me show you power."

"Oh, no," someone whispered. I'm not entirely sure who. Beast of the Oak Forest suddenly exploded in leaves and twisting vines, and his eyes blazed with brilliant green light. The grass under his feet writhed and straining upwards, growing preternaturally fast and reaching for the light of his aura. Ragara had hired the best money could find. Angel withstood the assault for only a few seconds before she dropped. Dog threw himself over her, but the tracker beat him unconscious with his sword pommel. Every stroke was perfect, a testament to Terrestrial power. While he was distracted I leaped onto his back. I lasted no better, but before I went down I sank my teeth into the Wood Aspect's leg. He didn't even have to beat me unconscious. Instead he just turned up the power of his anima until I could see Essence racing through his veins like ancient tree roots burrowing through the earth. The might blasted my face away and left me dazed and concussed.

"Murderer," he whispered and took my consciousness with his boot.


	4. Chapter 3

The Broken Circle

Act 3

I may as well tell you now that it was four days before I woke up. Not that I had any idea when darkness receded, and I looked up at the stone ceiling of my cell. It might have been a moment; it could have been a decade. My hands and legs were bound with iron shackles. Dog and Angel lay on other wooden biers, similarly restrained. We were in the same cell. Later I found out our captor, the Sheriff of Nibeldamt, had left us in her to recuperate or die as our fate dictated. It would have saved him a lot of problems if we'd have just died. Certain parties wouldn't have been pleased, as they wanted us to endure a kangaroo court and public execution. Still, I wasn't ready to go quietly into the long night. Instead I woke up gasping, terribly thirsty, and ravenously hungry.

"Hush," murmured a soft voice at my size. A strong hand lifted my head, and put a bowl of water to my lips. I drank until it was empty. The hand lowered my head, and I head the bowl sloshing in a bucket of water. "Here. There's more."

I drank again. The water tasted like blood. At first I thought it was contaminated, but then I realized I could taste blood when the bowl was gone. My tongue found dozens of scabbed sores in my mouth from where Beast of the Oak Forest's anima had shredded my mouth. As feeling returned and my limbs reported their condition to my mind, I realized I was in even worse shape than after my beating at the hands of Ragara.

"My body hurts," I gurgled from cracked lips.

"That will happen," the soft voice replied. "I've bandaged you, and tended to your wounds, but there are many of them."

"Thank you," I whispered. That didn't hurt as much as talking.

For a while I lay in silence. I knew what I had to do next. I knew why it was necessary. But I didn't want to. My pride simply refused to accept the right choice, and I had to wrestle it down until the indomitable ego that had driven me along submitted. I never thought making a choice could be hard. Carrying it through could be hard. Enduring the consequences could be hard. But for the first time I realized thinking a thought, and admitting something in the silences of my own mind was damn near impossible. Only knowing that it had to be done forced me on. It was only another price I was willing to pay.

"Hail, I'm sorry. I got them hurt."

"I know you did," Hail replied. Though I hadn't seen him since the meeting after the funeral, I couldn't wonder why he was here now. We needed him, and since appearing would be the right thing to do, he had. "You failed them. You failed Clockwork Dog, who trusted you, and Fall of Angels, who loved you."

"I know. I'm sorry."

"You're both wrong about one thing," whispered Dog from where he lay. Neither of us had realized he was awake. "Angel never loved you, Ending. She never loved me either, but she never loved you."

"Bullshit," snapped Hail. "She's been in love with him since she met him. I've seen it in her eyes for years."

"That's because she's in love with you, asshole. And you've been too blind to see it," Dog retorted.

"He's right, you know," I told Hail. "You see love in her eyes because you're the one. She almost knocked me unconscious when I was going to say something that would hurt you before we left. She'll leap to your defense any time. She came with me because of Ash Maiden, but that's because she knew you wanted too but wouldn't. Something about it not being the right thing to do."

"What?" Hail retorted like we both raved in madness.

"Stupid ass. Don't you think I've memorized everything she does?" Dog asked. He tried to say more but lost it coughing. Hail went to his side and gave him water from the bowl. After a moment, he continued. "You don't know how obvious it. You don't know how jealous I've been, and how much I wanted this to succeed because for once I'd have done something with her that you wouldn't. Instead you get the girl. And you're too stupid to appreciate it because both of you are still mooning over Ash Maiden."

"None of this is my fault!" Hail yelled. "All I wanted was her and she said yes! She came here to get Anvil's approval, because her family couldn't afford a dowry, and the girl was too old fashioned to realize I couldn't have given a damn about a dowry when I was getting her! All I ever wanted was her, and that's all I ever asked for. I even let her go to him-" he snapped a furious glance over his shoulder at me, "because I wanted her to be free to choose, and she still chose me!"

He was leaning over Dog, snarling at the wounded man, and suddenly realized what he was doing and stopped. Instead he stalked back to me, a better target for his rage. "Do you have any idea what I've been through? Can you imagine how angry I've been? Can you conceive the depths of my own hurt after the girl I'm going marry dies in a foreign city. Gods, I wanted revenge more then you did, because you were just bitter. You'd already lost her, but I had to deal with that at the same time as she died. But I had to give up revenge, because she wouldn't have wanted me too, and then I had to let you miserable bastards go without me and live in terror, waiting for word that this had happened because I knew it would eventually! With Ash Maiden dead and everyone else off trying to get killed, and I had to stay home where every rock, tree, and mountain tears a hole in my heart because it reminds me of her. Do you have any idea how terrified I'd be that you were going to die too, and then I'd have no one?"

"Yes," I whispered. "I know. And I'm sorry for that too. It's all my fault."

Hail started cursing at me. Graphic, violent, blasphemous dirty words spat from his mouth in complex and inventive curses, clearly polished through days of sitting at home, suffering in impotent silence. Ranging in pitch, timbre, and volume, he held nothing back as he unleashed a typhoon of profanity on me, swelling in obscenity until it past beyond the language of swearing and because an art in foul-mouthed vitriol. I had no idea what he even called me with his final epithet. Words defeated me. I stared up silently, because there was no response I could possibly give to that level of insult.

"Hail, I think you won," Dog observed from his table.

"I haven't won a damn thing," Hail countered. Then he busied himself examining our injuries, working silently because he didn't trust himself to speak.

"How is she?" I asked after he'd changed the bandages on both Dog and I. He was working on Angel's leg very slowly, barely touching her at all.

"Not good," he answered. "She lost a lot of blood internally. I think it's only partially healed, reopening from time to time." His words were carefully neutral.

"Has she woken up at all?" I continued. Talking about Angel wouldn't incite another rage, and we all needed to stay calm.

"Once or twice, but she was delirious. Dog's been awake off and on since I got here, yesterday. Anvil sent me word when Ragara Aino had the sheriff send the posse out after you. I came as fast as I could. You were more than half dead. No one had bothered to wet your lips while you slept. Dog had woken up a few times, and called for food and water. Sometimes the guards gave it to him, sometimes they didn't. Everyone's hoping you will all just die quietly," he explained.

"Feh," I disabused him of that notion. "We're much to obnoxious to do that."

"I know," Hail acknowledged. "Don't get me wrong, you stupid jackass. I'm glad you're not dead. And I hope you get better and make tons of problems for everybody, but even if you do, they're just going to hang you from the rafters. Ragara Aino is picking out hanging ropes for the three of you."

"You aren't very cheerful," Dog told him. "Have I ever mentioned that?"

"What do you want? Sunshine and puppies?" Hail snapped.

"Yes, actually. Bring me puppies. Fluffy ones."

"What? Like those joke names we used when we had to visit the sick kids after Ending got us in trouble for throwing tomatoes at the mayor?" Hail asked, wryly.

"You know, there's a funny story about that," I told him.

"I do know. I was there," Hail replied.

"No. There's a second one," Dog corrected him.

"Why don't you tell me?" Hail asked, taking a seat beside Angel. He hadn't looked at her quite the same since Dog had told him how she really felt so blatantly. Now he looked embarrassed and slightly uncomfortable around her. The other two of us told him the story from when we'd left Highmere to him finding us. He cracked up when we told him the pseudonyms we'd used, sighed as I explained how I'd tried to set Dog and Angel up, and mulled over the information that it had been a woman who'd killed Serenading Thrush. I revealed my suspicions, and he listened to them carefully. "It's possible," he admitted. "You have circumstantial evidence at best, and that's very thin, but it's possible."

"What we need to do is get out of here and track down Frozen Thane. He should have the answers we need," I concluded.

"You aren't getting out of here, Ending," Hail informed me with a sigh. "In a couple days, you'll be tried, found guilty, and summarily executed. Clockwork Dog will go first, because they already know he's awake. Also, for some reason, Ragara is especially mad at him." Dog leered at that. "But soon enough they'll learn you're awake too, and then your time will be up. If Angel wakes up, she'll get the same treatment."

"That's okay," replied Dog. "I'd rather be first anyway."

"Losing your patience? Has he been wearing off on you?" Hail asked, trying to be light hearted.

"No," Dog answered. "I can't watch. I've already told them I can't do it."

Hail couldn't say anything to that. He walked over to Dog and clasped his hand in silence. We stayed like that for a while. Sometime later I fell asleep.

Sometime later I awoke to voices. I cracked my eyes, and saw Hail standing at the barred door, talking through the grate. He was pleading with someone. I recognized the voice as Ragara's.

"My lord," Hail was saying. "I need to check her injuries, and I can't if I can't move her body. Please, let me have the keys. I need to examine her."

"No. Not now, not ever. She's going to rot in those manacles until I drag her by the hair to the gallows, and even then I'll bind her hands," he retorted.

"She's going to die long before that if I can't treat her," Hail begged. "She's bleeding internally. If I don't take care of her, she won't make it to the gallows."

"Then she'll die just like that!" Ragara exclaimed. "It's no better then she deserves."

"But it's better than the gallows. Don't you want to see her on trial? Everyone in town already knows what happened. Do you want the whole city to know you only managed to try one of the culprits, when you caught all three?" Hail, I noticed, left me out of the conversation entirely.

"Then I'll hang them when they're dead!" snapped the Dynast. Suddenly, I noticed why I hadn't immediately recognized his voice. Somehow, he'd developed a slight speech impediment. He couldn't pronounce hard consonants quite as well. It took an act of will not to snicker.

"And what would that prove? The Immaculate Precepts clearly dictate that the dead should be consigned to the earth," Hail pointed out.

"The Immaculate Precepts dictate I can do whatever I want!" Ragara retorted.

"Please, great one, don't you want to show the peasantry that you're better than them? That you ignored their feeble insults as truly beneath your dignity?"

"I'll show them that I won! That if they cross me, they die in prison or kicking from a rope," came the refusal. "And you may well join them at the gallows, instead of just in here to tend their injuries. Your words are getting quite close to insolence."

"Please, forgive me, sire," Hail responded contritely. "I mean no offense. I am simply a healer and want to tend my patients, as is my station in life."

"Then your station is to watch them die. I am finished," he snapped. His booted footsteps tromped off, and the steps of his escort followed him. Hail watched from the door, and then sighed when they were gone. His shoulders slumped.

"You all right?" I asked.

"I'm fine. Better than you, I might add," he replied, attempting a smile. He walked over to me, and checked my bandages.

"Listen, you don't have to pander to that selfish brat," I told him. "He's not going to change, so don't give him an inch."

"That's just pride talking," Hail replied. "Respect costs nothing, and if I could get the keys so I could properly examine her, I'll bow to whoever I have to. It means nothing to me."

"It's unnatural for anyone to be that self contained," I told him.

"Not nearly as unnatural as your desperate aspiration to throw your life away," Hail countered.

"Touché," I answered.

"She wouldn't want you to do that," he continued. "She felt horrible when she had to break your heart, and she kept telling me of girls she'd met that she wondered if I would set you up with. I wouldn't, of course, because I knew that would just make things worse for you."

"Thank you," I told him. "I don't think I could have taken that."

"I know. She did too but didn't know what else to do. She asked me once what I would have done if she had gone the other way."

"What did you say?" I asked, curiously.

"Been real unhappy," he replied with a dry smile.

"Amen to that," I agreed with just as wry an expression.

He gave me some more water, and we sat quietly. I lost myself in recollection of good times in the village of Highmere, and simple days where mastering a new kata had been the my greatest problem. My master, who I had never called any other name than that, had taught me an empty handed form and myriad exercises. Many motions relied on unusual hand motions that trapped my opponent. I didn't know if I'd ever be able to use the style. My wrist throbbed, but it was healing.

It was a long night. Sleeping is hard when you're shackled to the bed, and wooden planks aren't comfortable in the best circumstances. Hail made pillows for us as he could, sacrificing his jacket for it, and wrapping Angel in his cloak. The rest of us slept in the cold and didn't complain.

Sometime later she croaked hoarsely, asking for water. Hail rushed to her side with the bowl and managed to help her drink some. When he asked her how she felt, her response didn't make any sense. From there she rambled for a bit, her words getting weaker until she lapsed unconscious again. She kept breathing. We took what comfort we could from that.

"Hail, I know you'll do the right thing," I said, once the three of us were awake. "So please don't take this the wrong way. Would you help us escape if we could?"

"Don't ask stupid questions," he retorted.

"Stupid because the answer is yes, or no?" I asked.

Hail sighed, wearily. "Ending, if there were any way to get you out of here, I would do it without hesitation. Regardless of the consequences."

"Do you think you could get me out of the shackles if you broke my legs and arms?" I asked.

He stared at me in silence. I couldn't make out his expression in the dark cell. "Even if I did, you're still shackled in by the neck."

"I thought so. I was just wondering," I replied.

"Dog, do you have any ideas?" Hail asked him.

"Not really. Maheka won't help us. We're only worth anything to him because this doesn't matter to him. Shogg can do little outside his forest, and we can't contact him from here anyway. If Hail went, he might not be able to talk to him, and might not be able to return if he did. Nor do we have any mortal friends who might be willing to undertake a jail break. Anvil might, but he'd never risk his family, and I wouldn't want him to. He's done enough all ready." Dog clearly had thought this through. "Frozen Thane doesn't know us. I was wondering if there was some way we could persuade Defile Perilous that we knew something she needed, so she'd get us out of here, but I doubt she would cross Ragara for it. Ragara is intent of us getting dead here. I thought about Ragara's wife, but couldn't find any leverage there either.

"As to the bonds, they're probably Ragara's steel, and while not perfect, are well beyond any skill of mine. Maybe if we had a file or clasp or something, but I noticed the water bowl is wood, as is the bucket. With a month and a tool, I might be able to work through the plank of the table, but somehow I doubt we have that much time. Speaking of which, Hail, do you know-"

"Tomorrow," he replied evenly.

"Ah. I see." Dog went silent, digesting that.

"Though they haven't given a time for you or Angel," Hail told me. "You'll have two or three days once they find out you're awake. Angel probably won't make it to trial." He spoke very calmly, as if he was discussing the weather or the politics of a distant nation.

"How is she?" I asked, before Dog could say anything. He shouldn't have to deal with this before his execution.

"The bleeding won't stop. It's slow, but since I can't get food in her, and she barely drinks, it's fast enough."

"Any hope?" Dog asked, pitifully.

"There's always hope," Hail told him.

"Would you put money on her?" Dog asked, discarding Hail's optimism.

"Dog, I'll put every dinar I ever own on her."

"That wasn't what I meant," Dog observed, but he smiled in spite of his words.

"That's because you meant something stupid."

"Your bedside manner straight sucks," I told him. "I don't know if I've mentioned that, but for the medic of the group, you've missed some pretty common medicinal training."

Hail chuckled. "Sorry. I'm only mortal."

"Being mortal sucks," concluded Dog.

"Don't worry. We'll use our mortality to lure Ragara into a false sense of security," I decided.

Dog and Hail looked at me across the darkened cell. I couldn't look back at them because the shackles on my neck kept me staring at the ceiling, but I nodded solemnly in agreement with myself.

"Well, I certainly think they've fallen for that," Hail observed.

"This guy's plans are amazing," Dog told him.

"So that's what you're calling it," Hail responded.

The chains on the lock outside the door rattled. With a squeal of poorly oiled hinges, the door swung inwards. Hail bolted to his feet, startled. Dog and I tried to work ourselves around so we could see who it was.

It was many. They came one after another wearing ornate lacquer plate armor. Crested plumes brushed the dirty stone ceiling. One after another they marched in to line the walls like a parade ground. Nearly a dozen stood at attention within our small cell, and four more took positions around Dog's table. Already shabby, the guard who followed them in looked like a cave rat. He fawned over the man who followed him. If I had an angle, I would have spat over his head at the object of his obsequious concern.

"Good morning, Fuzzy Puppy." Ragara Aino greeted him with vitriol disguised as aplomb. "And you too, Hail. Or is there an absurd moniker for you as well? Burrowing bunny? Insubordinate Insect? Or are you still maintaining your innocence, that you attend to these vermin solely from a sense of duty?"

"Is there any injustice in attending to the sick?" Hail asked softly.

"There is a pointlessness in it," Ragara responded acidly.

"Compassion is never pointless," Hail corrected him. His demeanor was submissive when Ragara looked for an excuse to condemn him.

"Insubordinate Insect you may be. Do not let your compassion take you to the gallows with your patients, lest you hang as well to keep them company," the Dynast threatened him. The grace and tact he had carried himself with when we'd interrupted his breakfast was gone. Now he snarled his words, keeping his voice low. If he hoped that hiding his lisp in such a way concealed his lisp he was mistaken. It merely drew attention to it. "Bring that one." He pointed at Dog.

Our jailer set to work on the shackles with a wrench. It seemed we hadn't been locked in but bolted. Finally Dog was free. Ragara's guards put him on his feet, then knocked him down and stomped on his head for a while. Ragara watched dispassionately. "You know, of all of them I think you're the bravest one. You're certainly the smartest. The girl's too dumb to realize she's out matched. I don't know who she is, or why she's in a vile peaceful place like this. But she's killed people, so many of them she lost sight of the fact that I'm not people. The other one's just crazy. He's living in a fantasy world. But you actually knew what you were doing, and the odds of it. And you kept on doing it anyway. Fuzzy Puppy, or whoever you are, that leaves you as the only one without an excuse. So I'm going to put you through a worse hell then the others. You're going to watch them die."

Guards pulled Dog to his knees. He stared up at Ragara, who smiled down in exquisite hatred.

"Your revenge is letting me live?" Dog asked. His voice was elated, appearing inadvertently so. Dog would never lie that awkwardly.

"Yes." Ragara smirked. "It's something my wife taught me. Dragon's in the details, you know."

It was time for my personal brand of charm. "Would you stop lisping and talk like a man, burnt lizard? I'm trying to sleep here."

Ragara froze. His entire body clenched, and he paused looking at Dog.

"Now tell me something," I went on. I put limitless venom into my words, a gift I'd had. Somehow, I always could really irritate people when I wanted to. "What's worse? A dynast with no sense of gratitude to a man who helps him with his product, or a dynast who can't talk, because another man, a worm, a maggot, punched his jaw crooked?"

Now the guards froze. Several of them had been cocking fists to resume wailing on Dog, but they stared up at their boss immobile. Everyone did, wondering how he'd react.

"Personally, I think if someone doesn't have his honor, he's-"

"Searing Fist Attack!" screamed the enraged Ragara Aino. He twisted and swept his hand in a burning, overhead blow that smashed into my gut, splattering fire and blood in all directions. He hit me so hard the table underneath me shattered to smoldering flinders, and I hit the stone below like a bag of cooked meat.

Ragara panted, desperately trying to regain some of his poise. I wasn't sure if I was dead or not until the pain hit me.

"Now, did you have anything else to say?" the Immaculate Martial Artist replied, scrabbling at the edges of his self control.

I did. I called him the last thing Hail had called me, the profanity so vile I honestly didn't understand what it meant. Apparently Ragara did. He turned the color of ash.

If Ragara was going to do his worst to the one he hated the most, I intended to be certain that was me. Besides, Dog didn't have the spite in him to endure what I would.

The cell was utterly silent. No one spoke.

"Take them to my estate," Ragara said very softly, indicating us.

From the floor I looked over at my companion as the guards lifted him to his feet without another word or strike. For a brief moment we understood each other. I winked.

"Bring the healer," Ragara said over his shoulder as he departed. "As well as the sick one. I have designs for them."

I turn to the guard to say something cocky, but he forestalled that with his fist to my head.

In my dream I watched my body being carried through the passageways. We left a large building marked with the scales and measures of justice, and went through the grimy streets of Nibeldamt to Ragara's mansion. The east side of it was still beautiful, the only building untouched by soot in the city. It's west side was charred naked timbers against the sky. Seared to the ground by the fire the gardens were burned stumps of wood and cracked stone. Scaffolding was already going up around the manor house, scabbing over the wounded spots. I looked around, wondering why I had come here in a dream, when the four of us were carried past a figure in white and blue. She was known to me.

"Have you avenged me?" Ash Maiden asked.

"No. I don't have the power," I admitted.

She looked at me coldly in the dream. "If you really loved me, you wouldn't have failed."

That threw me into the waking world drenched in sweat. Smiths were pounding red hot bolts into the manacle on my right wrist, preparing to seal it to an iron rack I lay across. It was decorated in spikes and had chambers to hold hot coals. I gasped once, grabbed the red hot metal with both hands, and stabbed upwards into a face. He shrieked and jerked back, while his buddy startled, and loosened his hold in his shock. That was what I needed.

Breaking free of his hand, I kicked him in the throat and rolled off the rack. My landing drove the air from my lungs, and informed me why I wasn't bound. All of my ribs were broken, my internal organs were shattered, and I bled from everywhere. But I had no time for infirmity. I found the wellspring of spite, bile and fury that gushed limitlessly in the hole where my soul should have been and drank deeply. At the back of my heart was power that offered me the ability to warp fate like I so desperately wanted. I clutched it tightly.

The guards gasped, and cried for aid when I rose to my feet in the guttering glow of forge fire. Smoke and sulfur filled the underground cell. There were four of them, and one of me.

"Run," I ordered them in a low tone.

They fled.

I looked at my hands. They were branded from the iron, and bled slightly. But they were ready. I went to Angel, where she lay on an iron grate, and ripped the shackles from her body.

"Wake. It is time," I bade the sleeper.

Gasping as I had, she bolted upright and staggered. Shaking her head cleared it of the cobwebs of unconsciousness and injury. She faced me, and I pointed at Clockwork Dog. Together we tore his bonds apart, rending steel with our bare hands. The balefire in the forge began roaring, sucking air hungrily through the bellows and tearing shrieking breaths through the vents that lead upwards through the ceiling. We could have escaped through them, had that meant anything.

Angel lifted Dog to his feet and held him there. He took a shuddering breath, and then seemed to collapse, catching himself on his own legs at the last moment. I turned and watched him. My eyes seemed to burn, and leak tears of opalescent fires that dribbled up to my brow. It was happening to all of us. Our eyes, our hands, our faces all began to radiate brilliant light, white in total but each beam burned the world with unique color.

Hail yanked open the cell door to stop, astonished, in the threshold. The three of us turned to face him, steadily building in intensity at the center of our individual fires. His mouth dropped open. Behind him we heard the sound of dozens of voices, and the tramp of jack boots.

"Weapons," demanded Angel.

Dog stepped beside her, and held his empty hand curled as if about a scabbard. She grabbed empty air before him and drew a glowing saber of incandescent light from nothingness. Her expression was ecstatic, like a question she'd been pondering all her life was suddenly answered. When she walked it was like a dancer, so light on her feet she seemed to float, as she moved to Hail and the oncoming fight beyond him. As they stood shoulder to shoulder she paused and looked him in the eyes.

"I have always loved you," she told him with utter confidence. Then she moved past him, and her radiance was the sun come to visit a tunnel.

"Weapon?" asked Dog of me.

"I do not need them," I replied.

"Then I go to help her," he informed me, and moved after her. He too paused in the doorway to address Hail. "You are a good man. Make her happy and the Sun will bless you." Then he was gone, drawing blades from his own radiance.

Finally Hail turned to face me. Of the three of us my glow was the slightest. His eyes were filled with tears. I stood beside him, and placed a companionable hand on his shoulder. "You have done right by the Ash Maiden. Your restraint is admirable. But it is time now to lay aside that form and join us. Are you ready?"

"No," he replied honestly.

"Tough," I replied and punched the mortality out of him. Then I turned my back and strode down the tunnel, looking for a fight.

It wasn't hard to find. Angel wielded her saber like she had been born with it in her hand. It cut through steel like butter. She slaughtered her way upstream against the tide of Ragara's personal army, smashing through weapons and shields. Bodies crashed into walls in pieces. Knives flew over her head and shoulders, lanced under her weapon and slid into the empty places between great man-killing strokes. As she forged ahead, Dog dropped death before her, and walked along behind, snatching his throwing knives from the dead as they went. Their brilliant anima's glowed white and blue, flickering chaotically through shapes. It was quicksilver madness against the tide of armored mortals.

By the time I'd caught up with them, they were moving at a trot up stairs. They had run out of enemies, allowing us to make better time. Soon we ascended to the ground floor. We came out a oak doorway into an antechamber that Dog and I had raced through before. Beneath hanging tapestries dozens of soldiers were arrayed against us, pikes leveled. Above us, looking down from a landing, Ragara Aino stood beside a regal looking woman. He wore red mail, and blades were sheathed at his side. She wore a flowing gown of sea foam green, intricately embroidered like waves crashing against the shore.

"The Ice Walker. She killed one of us. Give us her location, and we will leave in peace," I told him.

"It is too late for that, Anathema," Ragara replied. To his warrior fanatics he called, "Kill them, and live as heroes in the Immaculate Faith!"

The hammer of his army hit the anvil of our Angel. Dog harried them like a plague. I bounded upwards, set my feet against a rippling banner that swayed in the wind of the fury below, and raced upwards like it was a broad platform. Ragara met me at the railing, and we came together like the wrath of old gods.

For years my master had taught me simple forms. They had seemed partially chaotic, with movements following each other like the random gyrations of leaves in the grip of a strong current. I'd learned how one thing would follow another, but had never understood why. Now it was obvious. The why had been flows of an unseen and unconscious power whose elusiveness before was betrayed by its undeniable simplicity now. Later I would come to learn this power was referred to as Essence, but in the hallways of the mansion I simply understood that elbow strikes followed kicks because that was the most effective way to augment them by that power. I knew why Brilliant Void had changed the footwork when he mimicked my form on the roof of the tower of ancient Jaggerfall. I knew how he had known.

But my newfound understanding of myself showed me underlying patterns in Ragara, that came to him fluidly while I struggled. He was very good, much better than he had shown when we'd fought the first time, and that time he'd crushed all three of us casually. Now he was armed, armored, and holding nothing back.

He cut the railing to ribbons, set the stone burning with his follow up stroke, and gouged furrows in the floor as I hurled over his head, sprinting up a hanging bell pull and leaping over the final screaming slice and the dovetails of fire that burned in its wake. I landed behind him, and took a donkey kick directly to the chest. It threw me into a flip, and I spun through the air before alighting onto the feathery tail of a quill pen, tucked into the inkpot of a desk. Ragara turned to face me, and I smirked at him. It seemed the most infuriating thing to do.

Ragara smashed the desk to blazing splinters. I stood my ground on the feather as it wafted downwards, flinging backhands at his head. Essence made my hands stronger than before, filling the veins with iron. He swayed backwards to let a pillar take the impacts of my fist, shattering it to dust. His retaliation was dual, scissoring strikes that he was completely not prepared for me to grab out of the air with my bare hands. Oh, it hurt, but that was mostly due to the red heat of the blades from the power that arced through them. The Dynastic scion stared at me perplexed. I leaped forward and smashed my knee into his face.

From there I drove him back. He landed on his back, and barely rolled away from my blazing fist. Screaming, I punched holes in the floor as I chased him across his balcony until he could leap to his feet and attempt a riposte. I was having none of that, blocked the blades, kicked his feet out from under him, and punted him into the air. As he sailed backwards, I leaped onto his cloak and dashed up his blazing garment until I stood on his chest and did violence upon him. His arc described a beautiful trajectory over the balcony rail and into the open space of the atrium. Angel and Dog held their own against the Dynast's bodyguards below. We destroyed the wall we hit, slid to the floor, and the roof groaned as I wailed on him with elbows and knees.

"Stop!" shrieked the magnificently regaled woman, his wife I presumed. She perched by the hole in the railing I didn't remember making. If there was any power in her voice, it fell from us like rainwater. Yet her soldiers fought consumed by fanaticism, and did not head her words. Angel and Dog retaliated in kind.

"She said hold!" cried a new voice, deeper and louder than Ragara Peleps Anara, for indeed it had been she. Hail had emerged from the stairway to the basement, and stood in radiance upon the landing behind us. His brilliant aura of gold and saffron swept around him like wings or the mantle of a lords cloak. In his voice there was power, like a gilt fist, that smashed into the participants in the melee and forced us to listen to him. His attitude commanded respect. Tentatively, weapons were lowered. The mad three of us did as well, stopping the carnage.

"Spare my husband. I will give you whatever ransom you demand," she told Hail.

He looked up at her, no less commanding for standing below her feet. "We have no desire to kill him. We want to know who killed a companion of ours, Ash Maiden, and what role he played in that."

I disagreed with the first half of that but with Angel nearby and already in the mood for violence, chose to hold my peace.

"What makes you think he played any role in that at all?" rebutted Ragara Anara. Instead of answering, Hail turned to me and raised an eyebrow. I had released Ragara and stepped away from him that his burning anima wouldn't sear my flesh. It had died down somewhat, and now, though it scored my clothing and degraded the walls, it didn't hurt me.

I crouched down next to him. Ragara was somewhat unaware of what was going on, a result of my knees meeting his head so many times. I snapped my fingers in front of his face until he focused his attention on me.

"Who. Killed. Ash. Maiden?" I broke each word down to an individual sentence. There was no chance he would misunderstand me.

"It wasn't me," he replied, slurring his words even worse than before.

"Was it the northwoman? The one known as Defile Perilous?" I asked.

"I don't know," he denied. He might have been holding signs with 'Falsehood' written in stars.

An idea occurred to me. "Did she kill Serenading Thrush?"

"No," he replied.

"He's lying," interjected Dog.

"Yes, dear. We know," added Angel pacifying.

"About everything?" I asked Dog.

"Just about Serenading Thrush. The first thing was a half truth. He doesn't know who killed Ash Maiden, but has suspicions. Isn't that right, Ragara?"

"No," the fallen martial artist denied.

Dog looked up at me and shrugged. "That was a complete lie."

"Did you tell her to kill Ash Maiden?" I asked.

"No," Ragara replied.

We all glanced over at Dog. He nodded his head slowly. "That's true."

"Where is she now?"

"The dead one?" he asked. I couldn't tell if he was being snide, or the concussions were getting to him.

"The murderer," I clarified, carefully keeping my sudden anger under control.

"Don't know. Hunting Frozen Thane most likely. That's what she does with all her free time," Ragara explained.

"What do you know about Frozen Thane?" Angel asked.

"Nothing. Just that he has bad choice in enemies," the Dynast replied.

We all looked at Clockwork Dog. He shrugged, and then nodded his agreement.

"Very well then, madam," concluded Hail to the woman on the balcony. "It seems our business here is done. You will stop all pursuit of us, and we won't have to repeat this performance. Agreed?"

"Very well," she replied.

"Thank you," Hail answered, and without a backwards glance lead the way outside. Angel followed him, and Dog followed Angel. I let Ragara sink back onto the floor, then threw a sweeping bow to her, him, and the armed men who watched us depart.

"And have a wonderful day!" I exclaimed brightly, in a tone calculated to infuriate them. Then I hastened after the others. It's amazing how cathartic that fight had been.

I caught up with them outside. The morning sun enveloped us like a long lost friend. It made me whistle with joy. Hail looked at me and asked, "Was that really necessary?" of my parting remark.

"Absolutely. It was the polite thing to do," I told him haughtily. He groaned, and cradled his head with his hand. "Listen. This is my mad quest for revenge. We do things my way. And if we aren't going to punish that bastard for imprisoning us, torturing us, and worse, we're at least not going to be civil about it."

"I thought you only cared about revenge? Why all the side drama?" Hail asked.

"It's my own personal brand of charm," I explained.

"What's the next move?" Angel asked, cutting us off before we could start bickering.

"We find Defile Perilous, and find out if she killed Ash Maiden. If she did, we end her." I replied evenly.

"If not?" Dog asked.

"We kill her anyway. She sounds like she deserves it. We just kill someone else too," I responded.

The other three looked at me oddly.

"We can finally stop tiptoeing around this damn town and get to business!" I explained. "No more asking questions, no more negotiating from a position of weakness. No more losing fights. We do this hard and fast, and let nothing stop us. Ash Maiden befriended Frozen Thane. Defile Perilous wants to kill him. That's enough for me. We kick ass, and take names, and then kick those named asses too. Now come on!" Since I didn't feel like continuing this discussion I took off running at that point. The others had to jog to keep up with me, as we raced through the dirty streets of Nibeldamt.

Our prison clothes had been gray, but now they were bleached white, and resembled the funeral garments we'd first come to the city wearing. We still radiated light, pouring out a blinding incandescence like before. Yet now our animas weren't changing sporadically. They were settling down into iconic figures that rose behind, fading as time when by but still visible. Dog had a man in robes, who held scales, a scythe, a measure, or hourglass in his hands. The icons flickered and changed, but were slowing down.

Angel had a celestial host above her, winged Valkyries that bore swords in one hand and cornucopias in another. Sometimes they were grim and terrible, and other times they were joyous. They flew above her, and had mimicked her motions in the fighting before. Every strike and parry had been mirrored by the horde's attacks.

Hail's anima was the most placid. It covered him like ceremonial robes, shrouding him in ancient finery of a style that tugged at the hackles of my memory. Behind him was a mandala of some religious significance that seemed familiar to me in an unplaceable way. All of us had glowing sigils on our foreheads, with some repetition of a circle. It was obvious somehow that the sigil was the most important thing of all, but I didn't know what they meant. I filed them away for later.

My path through the city wasn't aimless. I cut across byroads until we stood before the empty house of Serenading Thrush. We ignored the people who stopped and stared at us on the sidewalks and street corners and went straight in. There was no point in attempting to be secretive now. It had been almost a week since he'd died. The furniture was slowly disappearing. Window panes migrated to neighboring houses. We went upstairs to the bedroom, where the strong box lay open and discarded. It's contents were gone.

"Whoever did it had to come here to frame us," I explained. "And they left carrying lots of money. We find their trail and follow it."

"You do know the trail is a week old," Hail observed.

"I never said it would be easy," I countered.

"Down!" shrieked Angel, tackling Hail about the knees while scissoring my legs out from under me. I toppled backwards, as in a timeless moment a flight of arrows burning with jade fire tore through the plaster walls, ripping through the spaces where we had been, and shredding my tattered clothing. Broadheaded arrows passed so close to my eyes that I could see the individual stitching in the fletching. They sank two hands deep into the interior beams, quivering like ringing tuning forks, before writhing and taking root. Finally I hit the ground.

"What the-" Dog started yelling.

"Beast of the Oak Forest," snapped Angel. "Far row of houses, roof, green tunic turned gray with soot. Powerbow, boar hunting arrows."

"Oh," replied Dog, deflated. He huddled behind the overturned desk, while the rest of us scurried across the floor for what cover we could find.

"Dog, take him out," ordered Angel.

"What?" he asked, confused.

Angel was behind the shattered bed, broken from our first entrance to this room. She crouched and leaped to the desk. A single burning green bolt tore through the wall towards he, but she was spinning and smacked it with her bare palm. The corona flashed and crackled, but the bolt smashed into the ceiling. Angel landed on her side, still rolling, and crashed onto Dog, sprawling across his back protectively. Her hand was bleeding.

"Far row of houses. Fourth unit from the end, it has two chimneys. He's behind the chimney on the left side," Angel told him. There was a deep thwack, and a broadhead sheered off one of the oaken beams of the desk. Angel ignored it. "He's wearing a green tunic, like when we first saw him, but it's been turned gray by the falling ash. You need to take him out."

Dog wanted to complain. He wanted to argue about things like range, attacking blind, and exposing himself to a sniper to counterattack. But Angel lay across his body, shielding him with herself, and her face was touching his. If he turned his head quickly to the side, he would have kissed her. Her soft auburn hair was intertwined with his black stubble. Dog's brain wasn't working.

"Green tunic. Chimney on the left," she repeated.

An arrow sheared through the desk, passing through oak like mist. It lanced across Angel's shoulders, laying open a thin path of white skin with a line of seeping blood.

Dog grabbed her, rolled over until she was almost beneath him, and then hurling himself backwards and up, sailing into the beams of sunlight from the lone window. Snatching blades from plumes of green fire still wafting to the ceiling and sunlight, Dog flung knives out the window. Some passed nicely through the shattered glass, and some tore holes in the wall around it. Cascades of cutting terror filled the small window, the sky beyond, and ripped the chimney Beast of the Oak Forest sheltered behind to brick dust. Others went for the hunter, and he disappeared over the edge of the roof.

Hail and I caught Dog as he landed, and yanked him behind the fireplace. No one moved, waiting for a counterattack that didn't come.

"Did you get him?" asked Angel.

"I don't know. It was a good throw."

Glass shattered, tinkling like bells as it hit the ground. A single blazing arrow shot through the window and curved around the desk, shot over the bed, and lanced Dog's chest. As soon as it hit it burst into thorns and spines that shredded his skin and cut to the bone. He screamed out once, and my world went white.

I ignored the window and went through the wall. The two story fall was nothing. A brilliant green arrow shot straight up from behind a row of cheap houses, made a hard right turn in mid-air, and raced over my head. Hopefully, Angel would see that coming. I sprinted across the street and went through the front door of the first house I found without opening it. My passage through the started family's abode was punctuated by the shattering of walls as they got in my way, and I exploded from the back side in a rainfall of brick and mortar. Beast of the Oak Forest was readying another shot, pointing his bow straight up towards the sun. His head snapped down as I appeared, throwing white dovetails of Essence in all directions.

"Ah, shit," he gasped and whipped the bow around towards me. He loosed his shot as I got to him. The arrow tripled in number by the time it left the bow, hitting me in the chest, torso, and one leg. It flipped me sideways and spun me through the air, but I never lost hold of his jade powerbow, even as the power of his anima scorched my hand. He went for his quiver, and I went for him. My hands got to his face first.

I smashed the back of his head against a rock, then again, and then once more until he gasped in pain and lost his hold on the bow. A knee took the breath from his body and then I knelt on his chest, ready to beat him to death with my hands. Angel screamed 'stop' behind me.

"He can save him!" she shrieked, trying to get through the fog that covered my mind.

"What? Who?"

"Dog isn't dead, but he's dying. The arrow punctured one of his lungs. It might have hit his heart. But that bastard can save him," Angel gasped, emerging from the hole I'd made in the building. "Dog told me to get the Wood Aspect. That must be this one."

"You know healing magic?" I asked him. My voice grew soft because the strain of talking instead of killing was so great my lungs were having a hard time working. My heartbeat drummed 'murder' on my brain. One by one I snapped the arrow shafts off at skin level.

"Yes!" pleaded the Beast of the Oak Forest, gurgling the word because there was barely any air left in his lungs.

I grabbed him by the throat, heaved him over my shoulder, and stalked back through the house. My fingers kept involuntarily clenching, closing his windpipe, as I went. Angel had her hand on my shoulder, telling me that I had to let this one live. Her words were white noise that barely entered my consciousness.

Dog was in bad shape. His chest wasn't rising and falling evenly. The shaft was still lodged in the side of his chest, and blood was seeping down his shirt. Hail was working on him, cutting away his shirt and trying to get to the wound with panicked haste. It was speed born of despair. He knew there was nothing he could do but couldn't bear to do nothing. I dumped the Terrestrial in a pile at Dog's feet.

"Fix him," I grunted.

He opened his mouth to argue or negotiate, but stopped when he saw my eyes. Shapes weren't making sense to me. Light seemed to come from things instead of the sky. I saw the Beast's fear, and the knowledge of how close he was to an unspeakable death preying on his mind. Angel was talking, saying something about how we might let him live. I couldn't even figure out what language that was because the words made sense, but the sentences didn't. The Beast went to the injured Dog.

The tracker and Hail cut the arrow from Dog's chest, and deep red almost purple blood flowed from the wound. I could see down the hole in my friend's rib cage, and could see the weak beating of his heart, punctured on the side and pumping less blood through than spreading around. It seemed such a small and terrified organ to be driving Dog's life. Then the tracker's hands glowed white, and the bleeding stopped. Tissues reknit themselves as I watched. Sinew leaped from bone to bone, and fibers knit themselves under the skin. Sweat started pouring down Dog's face. Nerve fibers branched and spread, and were sheathed in flesh. He gasped and then started breathing easier.

I stared at Dog. He had an amazing bruise on his chest, larger then a dinner plate. The scar was smaller than expected, but it was gnarly shades of purple and white. But Dog was breathing. He sounded like he'd just run a marathon, but labored wasn't injured.

"He should be fine in a few days," offered the Beast, hoping that somehow he might get out of this alive. "If I tended to him, I could make sure that infection doesn't set in. There's a lot of blood inside-"

"Shut up," I snapped. "Clockwork Dog, it's on you. May I kill him?"

Dog looked at the mountain man, then sighed. "What good would that do? Let's make him useful, first." The other two exchanged a curious glance and waited. Dog continued after catching his breath. "Hail, you said the trail would be cold, right? And here we have a Dragon-Blooded tracker; the best money could hire. There's no point in wasting him, right?"

Understanding sinked in. Hail smiled and nodded his head in relief. Angel just smirked, and let herself be overjoyed that another of our friends hadn't just died. I sighed, because I wanted to kill the bastard so bad I could taste coppery murder . Still, we took Dog along because he was always right. This would be a bad time to fix something that wasn't broken.

"Find the trail, dead man walking," I told the tracker as Hail and Angel helped Dog upright. He was unsteady on his feet, needing one hand on a wall for balance. While he was getting his balance, the grimy tracker hunted around for spoor. It took him a while. He went so far as to sniff the ground, lick the strong box, and peer under everything.

"Falling soot has obscured much. Even if it hasn't, the trail is very nearly too old to be found. But only very nearly," he hastily assured me. "Shall we go then?"

"Are you sure I can't kill him?" I asked Dog.

"Very. We haven't let you kill anybody yet, and don't intend to let you start," he informed me.

"I've noticed that," I muttered. We set out downstairs and left the house, moving up the street heading north. Our course paralleled the river. People still watched us from their houses, but our anima's were muted now. Mine was all but invisible, though I wasn't entirely sure what it looked like. That was annoying. Our route took us uphill, away from the foundries. Once the habitations of man dropped away, our route swung beside the river, and followed it. Steadily heading upstream, away from the direction the three of us had fled almost a week ago, the trail was moving straight and sure.

"Another bit of evidence we weren't the killers," Dog observed to the tracker. "This is the opposite direction from which we went. And, there were three of us, while you refer to the trail singularly."

"Whatever you say," the tracker agreed appeasingly.

"Listen," said Angel. "We aren't going to kill you. Not unless you betray us or attack us."

"It's not you I'm worried about," responded the captive.

"We're not going to let him kill you. In fact, we're not going to let him kill anyone," Hail supplied. "That's more or less why I'm here."

"That's why all three of us are here," Angel agreed.

"You know, I'm perfectly capable of doing what has to be done," I pointed out.

"We know that. Trust me, doubt in your ability has never been the issue. That's the problem. We're worried you'll like it too much," Dog explained.

"I'm going to kill whoever murdered Ash Maiden," I stately flatly.

"Only if you get to him first," Angel countered.


	5. Chapter 4

The Broken Circle

Act 4

We were riding a high wave of confidence after our victories over Ragara Aino as well as the Beast of the Oak Forest. In addition Dog was healing even faster than we expected. He went to sleep the night after we left Nibeldamt and woke up fine. That was it. He had no soreness, no bruising, nothing. Angel and Hail clustered over him as I cooked breakfast, poking at his chest, constantly looking up waiting for expected hisses of pain. Dog shrugged.

"It doesn't hurt at all?" Hail asked, confused.

"Not a bit."

"You're healthy? Really?" added Angel.

"Better than before," Dog replied, smiling bashfully. He looked a little embarrassed at the way Angel kept touching him, which I thought was hilarious.

"Well, Beast of the Oak Forest, you've proved you are worth your word, at least," I told the tracker. He and I were setting the results of his hunt over the campfire. During the night, accompanied by Hail, he had gone out and returned with two rabbits and a variety of edible plants. We weren't intending to stay long enough to prepare them well, but I was doing what I could. Our campsite was in a small grove of brambles that had engulfed several small trees. No one could see in, and by building the fire near the base of an ash tree, the smoke rose and dissipated through its leaves, spread to fine to be seen. Eventually my companions got tired of poking Dog and joined us.

"So, feeling froggy?" I asked Dog once they'd returned.

"Ready for anything," he agreed, which would shortly be proved to be a complete lie.

I'm telling you this because I want you to understand how optimistic we were at that point. Life was good. We were in a cozy den sheltered by old hardwoods. This would last roughly nine seconds.

"So, when's breakfast ready?" Hail asked. "It smells delicious."

"Was that a compliment?" I needled him.

"Just serve, you-"

The ground exploded.

A hillock on the north side of the site that we'd used as a wind break came violently from together. Huge boulders ripped through the camp, nearly braining Angel. Tree roots snapped like kindling and flailed through the air, one catching Hail in the head. He lost consciousness. Directly underneath the fire pit, a ground blast tore the frying pan from my hand and cast me backwards into one of our harboring trees. My head met bark like a thunderball. The eruption had thrown Dog into the air, and now he was sailing over the treetops into the distance.

Standing in the northern crater stood a figure nine feet tall. It was covered in coarse fur over skin that looked like old leather. Barefoot, if such a term was meaningful, its toes were knurled as tree roots. From torso to toe and shoulder to wrist its underlying bone and musculature looked human. It, or rather he, for he was both naked and immensely, visibly male, was built like the colloquial brick shit house. The head and hands were those of a southern lion. Its mane expanded from the immense neck and flowed over the shoulders to mid chest. With prehensile paws for hands, each possessing unnaturally large blood red claws, its humanity seemed to merge smoothly with impossible nature. The whole being was speckled with intricate patterns in flowing white light that moved just beneath the skin. They accented his form, blazing from chakrah to chakrah, expanding the channels of his bodily energy from rivers to ocean currents.

Its companion made no such half measures. It was a bird with lightning for feathers, eyes the color of deep sky, and wings like typhoons. It had emerged from beneath the ground, but now hovered in air, wings wafting slightly on nonexistent winds, while lightning bolts reached from body to tree and seared air and earth. If the tattoos on the lion were oceanic passages, on the thunderbird they were starry galaxies that raged above a nighttime sky of storms and chaos. Between the two, their simple arrival had knocked three of our party senseless before a blow had been thrown.

"I am the Fall of Angels, and you have one heartbeat to stand down and put on some goddamn pants before I end you," said the sole standing member of our group. She stood alone and unarmed at the center of the clearing, looking defenseless and mundane. (The Beast of the Oak Forest had demonstrated his own good sense by yelping, "Fuck!" and running away as soon as our visitors had appeared.)

"Little girl, do not make me hurt you," growled the deep voice of the lion headed man. Its companion had taken flight after the Beast, and now screamed through the trees to the sound of thunder roaring from trunk to trunk. The echoes ripped leaves from stems, bark from trunks, and cast dirt from the ground. It's passage filled the air with the smell of ozone.

"One," counted Angel.

The interloped didn't waste more breath by speaking. My girl had that look in her eyes, the one that portended calamity like a fall of angels. Still, our attacker was bigger, stronger, and vastly more powerful. He had no idea Angel was just meaner.

They came together like natural forces bent on mutual annihilation. Suicidal migrations of the fire-beasts of southern deserts into the fast flowing river of Id were of similar intensity, but result in superheated clouds of steam ripping apart the river's banks, forming the voracious essence-powered storms of lightning and hail that give birth to the next generation of fire-beasts. The fight that took place in our campsite had no such reproductive necessity to justify its fury. Born and bred warriors bent on ending the engagement via destruction, they managed to capture the sound and fury of natural cataclysms. The lion attacked fast, seeking to overwhelm her quickly with his size and speed. Angel grabbed a rock, shrieked, "All Things Are Blades Approach!" and began whipping the blunt stone through the air in the fluid patterns of the Silken Lotus Style of the warrior-fanatics of Gnesh.

Being at best semi-conscious, I could appreciate Angel's technique with the calmness born of a serious concussion. Her take on things like feints and parries was unique. To Angel, a feint as a lethal stroke easier to parry than necessary, thrown in such a way that blocking it left one open for the invariable onslaught of follow up attacks. She thought parrying meant breaking your attacker's arm before his strike got home. Given that in her hands stones severed flesh and bone while a birch rod shrieked through the air and gouged furrows in oak trunks, her unique approach to combat ripped fur from skin like rainfall. She cut the lion's biceps off, excoriated his chest till naked ribs shone in the sunlight, and severed his forearm from his body save only ribbons of tendon and sinew before beating him with it.

Her primary problem was that the lion got better. He jammed his forearm back into place and flesh leaped from his arm to forearm dovetailing streamers of essence to reinvigorate the limb. His claws were quicksilver talons of white light and power that could block the horrific, unrelenting cascade of Angel's assault, cutting down the number of times she tagged him to a third. While on a mortal that third of strikes would all be fatal, the lion just took them and kept coming. He launched flurry after flurry of his own, using his absurd reach advantage to harry Angel around the campsite, never letting her disengage for positional advantage. She couldn't evade every attack which meant she had to block or dodge, something that resulted in exhausting her while the lion's mangled limbs reknit before my eyes.

Through my foggy brain, the thought that I should do something about this began to arise. My motor system considered it, and concluded that was impossible, as any non-reflexive action was an unacceptable instruction to my muscles. I asked myself what was injured, and the response was, 'Everything.'

The lion, who was growing frustrated, blocked another nigh insane torrent of lethal strikes, made no less dangerous by the fact that Angel's current weapon were handfuls of water she hurled from a canteen. Each splash lanced through tree trunks and holed rocks. "Peace, woman!" he bellowed. "I'm trying to take you alive!"

"Too bad. I'm not," snapped Angel. She leaped at him, swinging the empty canteen overhead in a two handed arc and cried, "Volcano Disrupts the Countryside Cataclysm!" before smashing it down towards the lion's exposed chest.

The big cat wisely decided not to take it like a man. "Perfect Evasion!" he cried, and suddenly, simply wasn't there when Angel's murderous smash whiffed past him. She hit the ground and a sun's worth of power blasted out from the impact site, vanishing into the earth. The lion darted forward, put his claws together, and came down at Angel's head with a double handed strike. He caught her cleanly on the base of skull and drove her head into the dirt with a sharp crack.

Angel lost consciousness almost immediately. But she did have time to smirk and whisper, "I figured you'd do that," before losing consciousness.

"Oh, poop," breathed the lion.

The energy Angel had thrown into the ground had traveled deep, bouncing off the geomantic lines of power that flowed through the bones of the earth and returned, magnified a hundredfold by the soul of Creation itself. Like magma breaching the surface, the ground under her enemy erupted in molten rock and fire, throwing him into the sky as it sheared earth and stone. The geyser of essence should have ripped his flesh to pieces and fried the pieces to ash, but those of the lion's kind are not so easily killed, even by geological phenomena. He clung to life and consciousness as he tumbled into the sky, and realized that even with his power, there was no way he was going to survive hitting the earth again. That was why he had brought a friend with him.

"Falcon! Help!" he screamed, and his words passed through the high open air of the mountain to where the thunderbird tore through woods and ravines after the Beast of the Oak Forest. I'm not entirely sure how the Dragon-Blood had evaded him so long. Later on I concluded that the tracker was simply much brighter than the rest of us, and had made sure he could run really fast from anything he couldn't kill. Regardless, the thunderbird heard the call, and abandoned his chase in a blast of ozone and the crackle of static. Shearing through the tree tops, the bird flashed across the sky. It could move much faster in the open sky than juking between tree trunks and crossed to the falling lion before he could have his sudden, splattering reunion with the ground. Catching him in moonsilver tattooed talons, the bird dropped and avoided the open pit of lava that waited below.

The lion dropped to the ground of the clearing just about the time I was getting feeling back and Hail was gurgling. Angel was lying still, breathing softly with her face buried in the ground, but still very much alive. The lion considered the lot of us, and looked into the face of the prospect of fighting more, who might very well be as capable as the girl. We weren't, of course, but the lion didn't intend to take that chance. He pounced on Hail, and hollered something about subdual, before beating him unconscious. Maybe he beat him unconsciouser, as I'm not totally clear on what Hail's state at the time was. Regardless, Hail wasn't doing anything, and my turn was next. My cranial trauma graduated to the next level, and I took a nap.

Of circumstances become a connoisseur of being beaten unconscious, I would like to grade the headache I had upon waking as a six out of ten. Splitting internal pain mixed nicely with numerous external bumps and abrasions, but lost points for not being potent enough to white out my vision or leave my ears ringing. Also, since I was out long enough for my spine to remember how to work, I had feeling in my fingers and toes upon waking to, which put me slightly better than I was upon going down. Excellent effort but underwhelming results, I decided.

I was hanging from a tree branch, trussed hand and foot like a hog to be taken to market. Twisting I could see Hail and Angel, but not Dog. They were in a state similar to mine. The woods around us were dark and deep. Clearly we'd been carried some distance while asleep. Now we were in deeper woods of the east, and the trees showed it in greater girth and deeper color. Sunlight only faintly made it through the canopy above.

"That one's awake," grunted the lion man. He'd put on pants, thank you heaven, and was watching us from nearby. He'd taken a seat against the vast bore of an old oak, and rested comfortably with roots for armrests. His tattoos gleamed with their own luminescence in the twilight of the forest. Near him crouched an attractive black haired woman in a blue and green smock. She was similarly tattooed, and wore a headdress of long, brilliant white feathers. They were as pure as clouds. Her skin and eyes were darkly tanned like those who live all their days outdoors.

"Is that the one that almost beat you?" she asked. Her voice was demure and so polite it almost concealed the amusement. She didn't look much past her late teens.

"No. It was the woman," her companion grunted.

"Oh, right. I forgot. You were beaten by a hundred pound girl."

"A hundred pound girl who hit me with a volcano," the huge man snapped.

"Well, maybe you shouldn't be so sexist," she suggested.

"Maybe you should shut up."

"Children," snapped Hail. "If you've going to capture and interrogate us, try to be mature. It's more intimidating that way."

The two squabbling figures froze. They hadn't realized Hail was awake but quickly got their surprise under control.

"We aren't going to interrogate you," said the girl. "We're just holding you so you can't harm anyone."

"Very nice of you," I told her. "Not terribly bright, but very civilly minded. Let me guess. You're working for Ragara Aino and are waiting for him to arrive hand us over?"

"No!" exclaimed the male.

"Shsst!" hissed the female. "Don't tell them anything."

"Don't be embarrassed," urged Hail. "You're doing a very respectable, if misguided, thing."

"Ragara Aino is a very charismatic man," I agreed with him. "It's easy to see why you'd like him."

The girl sniffed and ignored us. Without a word exchanged, Hail and I agreed to a subterfuge.

"Well," mentioned Hail to me. "I don't think he's really that charismatic at all. In fact, he's kind of a-"

"Don't say that about him!" I interrupted. "He's a fine and upstanding man; a Dynastic scion of the Blessed Isle."

"But he's a jerk!" exclaimed Hail.

"Got that right," muttered the lion. His female companion clearly wanted to correct him for speaking, but couldn't disagree with anything Hail said.

"But he's handsome, at least. Had I his looks, I would be irresistible to women," I opined, loftily.

"You would be easily resistible to women with Ragara's looks and the Scarlet Empress's money," interjected Angel groggily. She didn't need prompting to play along. Our captors snickered.

"Woman, you wound me," I retorted. "What if I had Ragara's charisma as well?" I asked the girl. She scoffed but remained silent.

"You've already got his charisma," Hail told me. "You're a jerk."

"Had you Ragara's looks, the Empress's money, and far more charisma than you do, you still wouldn't have a chance with her," Angel informed me, beginning to get into her role. The teen was nodding in agreement. "She's into me, after all," concluded Angel. The raven-haired girl froze.

"I am not!" she snapped.

"You are?" I whined at her. "Kitten, you get all the ladies," I lamented loudly.

"I know," gloated the giant, cockily. Hail burst out laughing.

"He was talking to me, my muscle-bound acquaintance," corrected Angel. "Besides, your lady friend is clearly more interested in me than you."

"I am not!" the woman in question reiterated.

"See? I told you," smirked the lion-headed giant.

"Grahh!" she growled and waved her hands in the air.

"You're good," Hail complimented him.

"Oh, I know."

"How do you make sure she resists the Dynast?" Hail asked.

"Oh please," snapped the woman. "Even if I ever did meet Ragara, which I won't, all his charm wouldn't do anything."

"Because you like me," Angel agreed with her.

"It's okay," Hail reassured the girl without a trace of mirth in his voice. "She's very pretty."

"I do not like her!" the girl snapped, getting angry and argumentative. "I just don't like muscle-bound idiots like him." The last was with a nod at the still lounging giant.

"What's wrong with liking women?" I asked. "I like them quite a bit."

"But women don't like you," Angel told me.

"I like him!" yelled the girl out of pure contrariness.

"And I like you," I encouraged her.

"Why him and not me?" asked Hail, with an injured tone.

"We didn't capture you to expand the dating pool!" snapped the big man. He was suddenly uncharacteristically irritated.

"Of course not. You did it to turn us over Ragara Aino," supplied Angel. "Unless we have all this backwards, and you're attracted to them instead of me like she is?"

"Well, at least someone likes me," mused Hail, philosophically.

With the girl arguing her heterosexuality out of shear contrariness, it was not had to get the man into a similar position. "I'm not, she isn't, and we aren't giving you to Ragara either!" he snapped, getting defensive, goaded by Hail's honeyed tongue.

"My mistake," murmured Hail, appeasingly.

"Very," grumbled the lion.

"But we can't start dating yet," I told our female captor apologetically. "I don't even know your name."

"See?" Hail encouraged the big guy. "You still have a chance."

"I've never not had a chance!" the big guy retorted. "You're just a captive."

"Ouch. No wonder you like women, with the only men around like that," mused Angel.

"I don't like women, and I don't like him!" the girl argued, getting angrier. She jumped to her feet and took several steps away from the lion headed man, towards me. "It's a pleasure to kidnap you. My name is Sky Eyed Vixen."

"I've never enjoyed being kidnapped more," I assured her. "I am called Fluffy Bunny by my enemies and the Ending by my friends." We tried to shake hands but had problems given as I was hog tied and all.

"You, sir, are a player," Hail mock admired me. He turned his head towards the lion. "Look at that stud. Bound hand and foot, and still gets your woman. Unfair, isn't it?"

"He does not have my woman!" the lion snarled.

"Don't worry, honey. I kind of like you," Angel told him. "Provided you keep wearing pants."

"Tell me, the Ending," asked Sky Eyed Vixen, "What does Ragara Aino call you, since you seem to know him so well?"

"Mostly obscenities," I admitted truthfully. "But when he's being civil, he's firmly in the Fluffy Bunny camp. That's why I hope you aren't going to give us to Ragara."

"That's the one thing Seven Roaring Terrors has correct," she told me. "We aren't. If you weren't servants of Defile Perilous, we'd leave you alone, but as things stand, we can't let you kill Frozen Thane."

I nearly choked at that one. Angel did as well, and a sudden silence threatened the clearing. Seeing the talkative mood he'd worked hard to create fading, Hail asked the lion-headed one, "Seven Roaring Terrors? Tell me, did you name yourself that?"

"What if I did?" asked the giant. "What's wrong with it?" He got up and strolled over to the rest of us, refusing to be left out of the discussion.

"Nothing," Hail replied, in a tone that insinuated the opposite. By now the three of us had our captors right where we wanted them. They would argue anything if we took the opposite stance. I wanted to bring up the seasons just to see if I could get one to claim winter followed summer.

"I like it," said Angel, taking the hint. "It's a strong name."

"See?" the lion defensively exclaimed.

"It's too strong," said Hail. "It's the type of name someone gives himself. See, where we're from, when one reaches adulthood, one is given a new name by the village elder. It prohibits people from naming themselves, otherwise bakers with overdeveloped senses of drama wind up named Darkstalker Ravenheart of Blood."

"Not that there's anything wrong with Seven Roaring Terrors," argued Angel. "So long as he keeps his damn pants on."

"See?" I observed to Sky Eyed Vixen. "She's obsessed with him not wearing pants."

"She does seem to fixate on it," the girl replied amused.

"I knew it," the big man agreed, once again conceited.

"My point is," explained Hail. "You're already a big man. You don't need a name that says that for you. One doesn't name a tyrant beast 'Gigantor.' One names it something like 'Tiny' or 'Nibbles' for the irony. You're what, nine feet tall? Anyone with half a brain can figure out you're a terror. Seven of them is pushing it, though."

"He's got a point," admitted Angel. "You might want to change it to something less ostentatious. Maybe something that flatters you brains."

"Which might be hard, because he isn't too bright," I murmured to Vixen in an undertone. She snickered appreciatively. The big guy heard, of course.

"Listen you-" snapped Seven Roaring Terrors.

"Don't say that about him!" interjected Angel, before anyone could beat some sense into me. She didn't have time to wait that long. "He's smart enough to defeat me!"

"He did that because he's big and strong and too dumb to know when he was beaten!" I argued with her.

"That's true," admitted Angel.

"Hey!" screamed the big guy, now feeling betrayed as well as insulted. "I figured out you three are working for the northwoman!"

"See?" Hail told Angel. "He did. Tell her how," Hail encouraged him.

"Simple. You've been working for her all along. Shogg promised her he'd help her find FrozenThane, but wanted her to take Ragara down a peg in return," Seven Roaring Terrors explained.

"Because Ragara beat Shogg, and made him his servant," agreed Hail, continuing to side with him.

"But Defile Perilous wasn't going to put her own neck out, so she had you three do it for her. And now you're tracking down Frozen Thane for her," the huge man concluded.

"Which we aren't going to let you do," the girl told me apologetically. "We like Frozen Thane."

"Never met him myself," I told her. "But I hear he's quite charming."

"Well, honestly he's almost as much of a jackass as Ragara Aino," she told me. "But he's helping us figure out how to rescue one of our own."

"Tell me, children," interrupted a new voice. "Would you like to spill any other secrets?"

In unison our two captors suddenly realized how much they'd told us and exchanged chagrined looks. Emerging from the shadows was a black panther. It strolled into the clearing with the supreme self confidence of a great cat and regarded us. Other than talking, it appeared completely normal if in amazing condition. Its coat was glossy black to the point of being immaculate. Blazing yellow eyes stood out as points of fire in the shadows of the deep woods. Once it had a commanding perch on a hillock it regarded the lot of us sagely. Normally my weirdness meter would peg at this, but normal had been left long ago. The two children settled into abashed silence.

"Now, prisoners, I commend you on doing a remarkable job of pulling confidential information out of two of my more reliable students. You've taught them a valuable lesson in watching their tongues, and all life should be a learning experience," the jungle cat told us.

"Did we just not get insulted?" I asked Hail.

"I think so," he told me.

"Wow. It's such an odd feeling," opined Angel.

"But your manners are lacking," it continued.

"We are bound hand and foot," Angel observed.

"This is true," acknowledged the elderly cat. I began to realize that the cat was much older than he appeared. Also probably not a cat, what with the whole talking thing. "Sky Eyed Vixen, please let your boyfriend down. Seven Roaring Terrors, cut down your girlfriend."

"And me?" asked Hail.

"Someone will get around to you," assured the cat. "Now, answer me truthfully. Are you working with Defile Perilous?"

"No," I said as the embarrassed young woman untied the knots and assisted me to my feet. "Though she may have manipulated us for her own ends," I admitted truthfully.

"Do you mean Frozen Thane any harm?" the cat continued.

"No," Angel assured him. The lion headed giant supported her with one hand while making short work of the rope with his claws. Soon she was on the ground beside me, chapping her wrists to get feeling back.

"What would you do now, if let free?"

"Find Defile Perilous, ask her if she killed Ash Maiden, and kill her if she says yes," Hail said. Without instruction, the two students set to work letting him free. Soon he was down as well, standing beside us.

"A worthy choice. She is chasing the northman some nine miles north of here. Shogg is aiding her, and in the forest he very capable. I wish you good luck. You will need it."

With that the old cat hopped down and strode towards the woods. The other two fell in behind him.

The three of us exchanged glances. "That's it?" asked Angel.

"Was there something else?" asked the cat, over one shoulder.

"No, I guess not," admitted Hail.

"Very well. Nine miles is a quite a distance. There's a mountain in the way, you know. Were I you, I would hurry." With that the cat and his students vanished into the woods.

"What the bloody hell-" I began, when Clockwork Dog burst from the tree line. He was bruised, bedraggled, and exhausted. Stumbling to the three of us gasping and sucking wind, Dog looked like distilled crap.

"Hi. I just- Are you-" he hacked out around deep breaths. He was panting so hard he was almost hyperventilating.

"Take your time," Hail told him.

"Put your hands behind your head. It'll open your lungs, and help you catch your wind faster," Angel encouraged him.

Dog did so, and after a few minutes managed to get himself under control.

"Sorry. I've been running since they took you," he explained.

"How did you find us?" Angel asked, curiously.

He looked at her with the inscrutable expression from Ragara's dungeon. "I can find you anywhere. Trust me."

"I'll take your word for it," Angel replied.

"Well, I've got good news, and bad news," I told him. "The good news is Defile Perilous is nine miles to the north, chasing Frozen Thane."

"The bad news?" Dog queried.

"They're nine miles to the north. There's a mountain in the way. We're going to run," supplied Hail.

"Nine miles. North. Over a mountain," Dog repeated, just to be sure he heard that right.

"Yep," I confirmed for him.

"Right." He groaned, leaned back to stretch out his abs, and twisted a few times, working out the kinks in his back. "Well, let's get started then, shall we?"

We grinned at him. "All right, then." I said.

"Which way is north?" asked Hail.

"That way. The way I just came," supplied Dog.

"The mountain?" asked Angel.

"It sucks," replied Dog.

"Nine miles?" I asked.

"Oh, yeah," Dog replied.

I patted him on the back, trying to be both apologetic and companionable. He laughed a little, but shrugged and set off at a trot. We fell in behind him and traveled.


	6. Chapter 5

The Broken Circle

Act 5

That run broke me off. We stopped at the few streams we passed to rest, drinking deeply of the sweet mountain water while we did. By the time we'd left the company of our captors, daylight was waning in the early afternoon, leaving us on a timetable. We had to move quickly. At first we let Dog set the pace, since we expected him to be tired. Two miles later and several thousand feet higher, we forced him to stop so the rest of us could catch our breath.

"I keep forgetting you're not a small, bookish kid," Hail admitted after plunging his face into a shallow pool. He was speaking to Dog, who paced around the clearing, keeping his muscles warm.

"I am a small, bookish kid," Dog countered. "I'm just poor, have no books, and like to run. While you're getting your wind back, mind explaining to me what happened during your absence?"

Angel did most of the talking. She broke the chain of events down quickly, omitting most of the technical details of the fight. Dog did ask, "You let him knock you out intentionally?" at one point in her tale.

Angel shrugged. "It seemed reasonable at the time," was the only explanation she offered. After that Hail took over the narrative of our capture and reverse interrogation. They agreed that the panther had probably let it go on exactly as long as he wanted. The coincidence that he had left with his students in tow just as Dog arrived was too unlikely to be unintentional. Similarly to Maheka, the jungle cat had set the situation so he would gain if we succeeded, but lose nothing if we failed. On the other hand, that implied our feline friend was at least nominally on our side. Still, we resolved to trust him not at all. Paranoia was setting in.

"I'm impressed you managed to get them to fall for the crossfire," Dog told us while we were trotting along a game trail.

"They didn't," replied Hail cryptically. After some prompting he explained, "The girl, Sky Eyed Vixen, was buying it, but the man was ignoring us. I had to force him to start talking."

"You forced him?" probed Dog.

Hail spent several moments looking for words. We were all scrabbling for vocabulary to describe our powers. "Do you remember how you threw those knives at Beast of the Oak Forest? You didn't just throw them, you threw them better?"

"Yes," agreed Dog in a tone that encouraged Hail to continue.

"Well, I did the same thing. I put power behind my words. Normally I think Seven Roaring Terrors would just have ignored us when we started trying to eek a reaction out of him. But he didn't when I made my words-" he stopped, and tried to figure out how to explain it. "-more."

"When I was living in the Imperial City, I once heard Dragon-Blooded warriors talking of 'Charms.'" Dog reminisced. We all grew silent, surprised he was willingly breaking his silence on his history. "At the time I didn't understand what they meant. They talked about them like they were tricks, little moves they've figured out which let them go past the normal limits. I think that's what we're doing."

"I noticed that too," I agreed. "There were things my old sensei taught me to do but never explained why. When I would ask, he just told me that it was part of the form. But up until now, I've never been able to make the tricks work. Now, they seem easy. The secret to them, the 'trick' I was looking for, makes sense now."

"Are these tricks, Charms, magic?" Hail asked.

"No," replied Dog thoughtfully. "They're close, but I don't think they're the same."

"So, how long did you live in the Imperial City?" asked Angel, losing the fight against her curiosity.

"Oh, look. The sun's setting. We should pick up the pace," observed Dog. He immediately sped up until we couldn't afford to waste any breath on speaking. I momentarily hated Angel but soon lost the energy for that too.

After that we ran hard. The mountain did indeed suck. By nightfall we were crossing terrain we'd already passed, and sheltered for the evening in a small glade, near where wild lilies grew in waterfall pools. I tried to take watch but succumbed to sleep in the end.

My dreams were simple, like what I'd had before. Ash Maiden was alive when I slept. Every time I woke she died. If my body didn't require it, I would never close my eyes.

Angel was watching me curiously when I dragged myself from my blankets. Without a word she fell in next to me on the way down to the stream. While we'd agreed that no one should go off alone for safety's sake, I knew that wasn't what this was about.

"You don't sleep very well, do you?" she asked while washing her face in the river.

Perched against a tree with my back to her, I was watching the woods for signs of an impending assault. She had all the privacy I could give, but it also gave me an excuse to hide my reaction. My dreams weren't a good topic of conversation.

"I thought we agreed not to talk about this?" I asked.

"So that's why you didn't want to wait in Shogg's woods. You're scared of sleeping," Angel surmised.

"Again, this isn't something we need to discuss," I told her.

"I'm not sure of that. Have you considered your bad dreams might not be because of simple guilt? We've dealt with a lot of people with more than human abilities, including us. Someone could well be influencing you." Angel told me over the noises of splashing water.

"I don't have to stay here for this, you know. I'm about to leave," I threatened.

"No, you can't. I'm giving myself a bath, so you have to make sure no one looks at me while I'm naked."

"What if I look at you while you're naked?" I countered.

"Please. You'd need to admit to yourself there are girls other than Ash Maiden in the world, and I'm pretty sure that part of your brain is broken. Both of you are like that," she observed acidly.

"Both of who?"

"You and Hail. You know how impossible it is to try to win a guy who's in love with a dead girl, much less my best friend? I can't even really try, because I feel like I'm dishonoring her memory." It suddenly occurred to me that Angel's acidity wasn't directed at me, but at herself. After her admission at the moment we'd come to our power, she'd never spoken a word to Hail. I was an idiot for not noticing that before.

"Have you talked to Hail about it?" I asked.

"No," she admitted.

"Why not?"

"Scared."

I almost turned around to stare at her. This was the girl who let herself get beaten unconscious to hit a giant cat with a volcano. "Of Hail?"

"Of him telling me 'no.' Ending, I already know he doesn't feel the same way for me. If I push the issue, he'll just have to reject me. Maybe in a little while when time's taken the edge of his grief we can discuss it. In the mean time I know what he would tell me, and I'm scared of hearing it," Angel explained simply. Her words sounded practiced, giving the impression she'd rehearsed this speech on herself many times. "I wish I'd never had said anything to begin with."

"Then why did you?" I asked. "I mean, when we escaped from jail. Why mention it then?"

"Because that was when I first got power," she explained. "This, this, whatever this is. I'll ask Dog what it's called. He'd know. But I didn't realize how it worked. I thought I was immune to everything, but now I realize there's no gift that would let him reject me without making me want to cry." She was silent for a moment, and the pool was still. The only noises were birds in the trees, and water cascading down the falls. "Besides, if something happens, at least he'll know."

"Nothing's going to happen to you," I retorted, bothered she would even imply otherwise. "You're the biggest badass we've got."

"We'll see," she replied.

"Have you thought about anyone else?" I asked, hoping to distract her.

"How can you even ask me that?" she whispered. Her voice sounded betrayed. "You, of all people."

"Touché," I admitted. "I'm sorry. That was inconsiderate of me."

"Jerk," Angel grumbled in a hurt tone. I heard more splashing noises. "Besides, I'm not here to talk about me. I'm here to ask you about your dreams."

"Sorry, but this might be a wasted trip for you. I don't want to talk about them."

"Well, tough. We're talking about something while I bathe, since I can't do this with either of the other two."

"Why not?"

"I'd be embarrassed to be naked around either of them. But if I could get you to pull your head out of your butt long enough to even think about another girl, I'd feel like it was a worthy sacrifice."

Angel was not given to tact or mincing words, I'd noticed.

"Shouldn't you have feminine modesty or something?" I opined.

"I have plenty. That's why you're looking at the woods, instead of at me."

"No, I'm looking at the woods because I'm worried someone might try to kill you while you're naked."

"Don't quibble. Tell me about your dreams, Ending." I was going to lose this. I could never beat Angel in a battle of wills.

"Dammit woman. In my dreams she's alive. She's with me, not him. When I wake up, she's dead. I couldn't even let her tell me it was over without making her cry. Fun memories. It's not complicated. What do you want from me?" I snapped, staring angrily at the trees.

"You know, that's not your fault," Angel said quietly.

"Yes, it is, and you may as well admit it," I sighed, and realized I couldn't avoid explaining this. "You know why she didn't love me? It's because I'm a hair shy of being ax crazy, and there's nothing I can do about it. Look at how we took it. Hail mourned her and did what she would have wanted. I'm trying to get my friends killed while I go find someone to murder. You know why she didn't love me? Because of that. I can't even blame her for it. Now can we please not talk about this anymore?"

Angel finished getting dressed while I ranted, and by the time I wasn't snarling any more came up behind me. She wrapped me in a sisterly hug, and I could feel her wet hair against my back. I ignored her until everything was safely bottled up again.

"Ending, Ash Maiden found the meaning of her name in death. Please don't do the same," she whispered softly.

"We'll see," I muttered, throwing her words back in her face.

"You're a pigheaded ass, you know that?" she told me.

"Doesn't anyone in this group know what a bedside manner is?" I asked her rhetorically.

"Dog does," Angel informed me. "At least ask him about your dreams, will you?"

"Do you promise to drop the topic?"

"Yes."

"Fine, then. I'll talk to Dog about my dreams. I'll talk to the whole world about my dreams, my bad habits, and what I had for lunch yesterday if you just stop pestering me," I ranted to the world.

"Good." She gave me a parting squeeze and stood up. "Let's go back to the others."

"Hold on." I didn't bother taking off my clothes. Instead I just jumped into the pool, scrubbed myself with sand, and rang out everything I was wearing when I got out. After that we went back to the campsite.

While we were gone, Dog and Hail had foraged successfully, and we came back to a collection of fruits, berries, tubers, and plant stems. We ate. Angel caught my eye, then sent a meaningful look at Dog and grunted at me. I sighed.

"Have either of you been having weird dreams?" I asked, skirting around the issue.

Hail thought about it, then shrugged. "I dream of Ash Maiden a lot. The way she moved, what her cooking smelled like, that sort of thing. They're sweet dreams, but they make waking up hard sometimes."

I mulled over that while asking Dog, "What about you?"

"My dreams are always pretty strange. I try not to pay too much attention to them," he replied.

"Strange how?" I asked.

"Last night my dead grandmother attacked me with a frozen weasel, and I had to beat her to death with the melody from _Little Blue Baby_," he answered, referring to an old lullaby. "By the time I got her down, a flower grew out of her forehead and blossomed into the Scarlet Empress, whom offered me a cupcake. The cupcake was full of octopi who immediately began eating Nexus. After that my legs turned into the color green. Then I woke up."

We all stared at him. Dog shrugged. "Like I said, my dreams are pretty weird. They're just dreams though."

I turned to look at Angel, asking her with a glance if she was satisfied. She put a tired hand to her forehead, and waved submissively.

"Why?" asked Hail, observing our interplay.

"Nothing at all," I replied evenly.

"Well, if you girls are done whispering, I suggest you head up to the ridge line and look towards Nibeldamt," Dog told us.

"Why?" I asked.

"It has begun," he said simply. "Now, I'm going to go wash off."

With that the two of them went down to the stream. Angel and I picked our way up the hill until we hit a high spur that carried us to open air. The sweep of heaven was undisturbed by the few nosy peaks that reached for it, trying to see what went on behind the vault of the sky. Ecstatic birds flew below us, winding their way through the vales of the Meander mountains. We stared at the world, laid bare at our feet by the naked power that made mountains. For a long time we just looked. Then slowly our attention swung to the city.

Nibeldamt was framed by two great peaks. They had once been joined by a soaring kol, but centuries ago an earthquake had sheared that apart. Now their shoulder's reach for each other, ending in cliffs that bookended a view of the foundry city. It was under its usual cloud of ash. The gloom that had been so pervasive while we were there seemed tiny, bottled in by the surrounding peaks. As we watched, the smokestacks of First Age iron foundry gouted flames into the sky. The city was an unnatural mechanical beast. But as we looked, we became away that the fires ripping through the city were not solely confined to the foundries. They ripped through the city, burning some of the lesser mansions and a garrison on the north side.

"Maheka's making his move," Angel observed. "He must have decided we'd weakened Ragara's forces enough."

"He would never have done that if Ragara himself was still fine," I said.

"Then he must not be," Angel replied.

We considered the aftereffects of our actions that now plunged the city into fighting. We couldn't see individual figures, but knew they were moving from street to street, clearing patches of Ragara's resistance. The people loyal to him would be driven from their homes. Only the continued outbreak of dirty red flames confirmed that it wasn't complete already. We watched the city burn for a long time.

"Man. The animal that kills itself," observed a new voice. We glanced around and saw her. Between two standing stones in the shadows of the morning sun stood a woman in elegant stillness. Angel and I didn't need to exchange a look to know we both recognized her. Though having only seen her briefly, I never forget a face. (Or a prostitute for that matter, but that was part of my old life, like larceny.) Underneath her elegant formal wear, Serenading Thrush's hooker was as pale as her northern skies. She regarded the distant violence with dispassion. Her hand rested lightly on the silk wrapped handle of a long broad blade hanging from her belt.

"Ants," countered Angel. "They make war. They'll conduct genocide if they can."

"So the murder is part of the natural order? I feel vaguely absolved," the woman replied.

"Defile Perilous?" I presumed.

"Indeed. Let me guess. Fluffy Bunny?" she replied, amused. I smiled.

"Cuddly Kitten," Angel introduced herself.

"Did you kill Ash Maiden?" I asked her.

For a moment Defile Perilous stared at me, like she was debating lying. Finally she shrugged. "Yes. I did. Shall we make this a formal duel, then?" asked the Icewalker.

"No. We're just going to hack you to pieces," I replied.

She looked at us bemused. "I forget how direct you manlings can be. It's quite refreshing after Yu Shan."

Hail shot her in the head. Three feet of fury behind an armor piercing needle cast from a bow of light and fire dropped on her from behind, perfectly matching the incident angle of the morning sun. The bow had no string to vibrate or wood to creak, and the fletching on the arrow was pure essence that made not a whistle as it cut the air. Defile Perilous had no warning at all. She still parried. After that she glowed a soft verdant green for a split second before the time to notice such details was over.

Angel and I screamed like lunatics as we blitzed her. Our cries were intended to distract her even as Dog and Hail filled the air with their second volley. Hail's fingers flew from quiver to bowstring with unhesitating speed, hurling arrows until it seemed the sky was falling upon her. Every shot missed. Dog threw so many knives that they occluded the sky worse than a plague of locusts, and came down on Defile Perilous like rain in a winter storm. She parried with her sheath. Angel whipped the cloth belt from her waist and snapped it outright, where it held its rigid shape and sang like a nightingale as it cut the air. The woman severed it with an effortless draw of her blade. If Angel's improvised weapon sang like a bird, the murderess's sang like an opera star. I just screamed louder and tried to punch her in the boob. That did not go well for me.

Needless to say, she blocked. With a flick of her wrist, she drew the weapon along my forearm until it leaped to my chest and laid me open to the ribcage. Freakishly, that hurt more than it should have. In addition I went tumbling backwards down a bluff, bleeding everywhere to crash to a halt against a rock. Swearing, I grabbed my chest and squeezed it closed, willing the wound to stop bleeding until I could go beat that woman to death with my hands. It did. Two steps got me into a sprint and I leaped back up the bluff, sailed a dozen yards past a scree field, and landed back in the fight, flowing fluidly into the motions of my old master. Defile Perilous was before me. For some reason there were bears everywhere.

They were big ones too. Ten to twelve foot grizzlies roared and swatted at Angel. Each one was about half a ton of muscle and claws, furious as a rabid dog, and I noticed upon further observation, attacking in infantry tactics of the Su-Hon barbarians. Admittedly, the Su-Hon used little more than berserk rages and numbers, so perhaps it was a coincidence. Then again, given that I'd returned to find several tons worth of rabid grizzlies had managed to sneak up on us, and berserk rage was quite the effective tactic for them, perhaps not.

The one immediately before me bellowed as it swatted at my head. I stepped forward, blocked to the inside, and punched it in the guts with all my strength. I gave it the extra effort. My fist smashed into its hide and sent shockwaves through its fur before flinging twelve hundred pounds of pissed off bear off the other side of the mountain. I juked under the next claw, darted up the back of one distracted by my sword-goddess, and leaped after Defile Perilous, glowing like the sun.

She pivoted to block my foot with her sword, even as her hands glowed brilliant crimson that flashed up the blade. Wild fire red streamed behind her weapon as it describe an artistic arc, whipping around to my head. This time I was ready for it and caught the blade between my palms. Like Hail had described, I put power into catching the weapon. For a moment transfixed on the tip of her weapon, with my feet dangling above the ground, she seemed perplexed by this until she whipped the blade around again and beat me against the ground.

This was distracting her from Hail's hail of arrows, which would have been the point were I thinking clearly. She weaved back and forth among them, taking cover behind her ursine shock troops and letting them absorb the leaf headed stings. Finally getting her weapon out of my capturing hands, she turned to attack Angel who was cutting a swath towards her. I staggered upright to interfere, but a brown bear batted my head downwards, compressing my spine and blinding me while the blood pooled at the top of my head. A thrown meat cleaver the size of a barge oar took it in the head then, and I regained my wits long enough to punt it over backwards. The bear back flipped and crashed into one of his comrades. Angel had seized one of the Kodiaks by the guts, had managed to get it airborne in the most staggering O-goshi hip toss ever, and was parrying Defile Perilous's terrible counter attack with the thick, ursine skull.

Implacably the swordswoman feinted once and went for Angel's knees, trying to slip her vast singing blade under the baffled bear where it's huge bulk would conceal the strike. I interrupted by leaping at her back, shrieking something about coiling dragons, and latched onto her shoulders. When a grizzly behind me smashed me into the ground, I took her with me. We ate dirt together.

Angel flung the Kodiak she had a handle on away and snatched one of Dog's flying knives from the air. It was one of the few he was hurling that wasn't formed of solid shadows and light. Defile Perilous performed a shoulder toss on me that was simply impossible given position and leverage, but nonetheless delivered me to the furious offices of an enraged ursus majoris. It had an open injury on its belly that looked remarkably like my fist. I think it remembered me.

The bear snatched my leg from the air with its teeth as I went by. That really stung. But it also put its head in a still position. Dumping enough essence into my elbow to raise Atlantis, I smashed my forearm into its snout, cutting the bear's jaws in half. I dropped to the ground with teeth still in my leg while the baffled grizzly tried to figure out why it couldn't feel its face any more. The opening provided a perfect avenue past its thick skull for my fist. As the thing toppled and its head turned to a fine pink mist, I tried to figure out what was happening to Angel.

The ladies were going toe-to-toe with reckless abandon. Unfortunately, my girl was losing, and the horde was blocking my avenue to her. Fortunately, Dog stopped his onslaught on the bitch long enough to sling a flurry of knives my way. They were broad and slow spinning, providing a perfect series of aerial stairs I darted up, hurled over the shaggy heads, and came down all knees and elbows on my lesser favorite of the girls. She didn't have time to parry my body with the pointy parts of her sword and merely smashed me from the sky with the pommel. Still, that finally distracted her enough for Angel to use the techniques of "Rock to Face" style martial arts. One of the older styles, many people don't have the respect for it that it warrants, especially considering Angel could cut glass with a dull pebble, and the one she was using outweighed me.

Defile Perilous went down hard a second time. The side of her face had been laid open to the bones of her skull. Were it not for the sudden rush of her bears we would have finished it then, but they overwhelmed us, forcing us back. For the first we noticed that bear carcasses lay everywhere with arrows sticking out of their eyes and nostrils, mute testimony to Hail's efforts. More of them kept coming, rushing around rocks that could barely conceal a bird. There seemed an infinite supply, which was quite likely if Shogg the Forest God was bending his effort to it. We had no idea the extent of his power. That being said, we were prepared to deal with a nigh limitless supply of targets on our way to finishing the fight.

"Ending, get me a weapon!" snapped Angel as the tidal wave of fur tried to overwhelm her. She wasn't quite as mobile as me, lacking my penchant for acrobatic nonsense. Currently engaged by five great shaggy beasts she was holding them at bay, but couldn't direct enough attention to anyone to finish it. I got pincered by two mammoth Kodiaks, roaring to deafen the heavens. Dodging claws, I bounded off the immense girth of one, spring boarded from the snout of another, and danced across the heads of the furious horde.

"Weapons!" I shrieked into the distance. Hail must have heard me for his fusillade stopped for the first time. It took several stomps to get a faction of the terrorizing bears enraged with me, and then I lead them towards Angel. Still bellowing they swarmed over their own comrades in pursuit, breaking up the unified assault on Angel. Out of the chaotic maelstrom of bears she leaped, unharmed, and glowing like the war goddesses of heresy.

"I still need a weapon," she snapped as we went for Defile Perilous over shaggy heads, forsaking the ground entirely.

"Coming!" called Dog.

We glanced right. At first we though he was flying, until noticing that the wiry little man was riding two of Hail's arrows and clutching a third for balance. With whatever bow Hail was using he'd shot Dog at us in our moment of need. I caught him and carried him along, for his feet hadn't learned the trick of ignoring the ground. But as our target got her feet under her and climbed upright through shock and anger, Angel grabbed Dog's open hand and clawed a blinding saber of glorious light from nothing. The women met again, this time equally armed, and made savage war on each other with a viciousness that only comes to enraged women. I chucked Dog back the way he had come, and he sailed into the distance flinging knives like an edged hailstorm.

When Ash Maiden's murderer had hit me the first time, flaying my chest open, I'd lost track of self restraint. When I dove at her again, she smashed me in forehead with her pommel stone. It must have hit pressure points on my head, for suddenly I ceased to care about the woman I fought beside, and lost all manner of thought save my cancerous obsession with killing the pale demon with the starmetal blade.

The melee that took place on that mountain top was perfect. We three ascended through combat to divine bloodlust, not just intent on killing but destroying. Like a gray mist the intruding minions of Shogg, Lord of the Forest, faded away as Hail and Dog came to understand the nature of murdering them. Carcasses dropped around us, outside the island that was our little world.

The problem was that she was better than both of us combined. Angel got tagged across the arm then a leg. I took another to the gut. Every strike separated us from who we were. Soon we weren't teaming up, but trying to overwhelm her with our respective savageries. We became iconic forces, but in the depths of that soulless murder, I suddenly accepted that I wasn't going to win. That let me understand that winning was less important to me than Defile Perilous dying. Then everything became very simple.

The glittering starmetal daiklave was rising, casting aside Angel's stroke. It traced a brilliant passage through the air, coming back around towards her for a riposte when I set my foot on Angel's hip and pushed down, throwing myself into the air. Soon the weapon and I were alone in space, coming inexorably together. Angel's body was shoved down, shoving against the ground, which pushed back against her even harder. Angel took that strength and threw it behind her. She lunged at Defile Perilous, who tried to retreat but had already committed to attacking me. I captured her blade between my hands while Angel drove her own sword through the icewalker's chest.

My heart exploded in pain. Suddenly Angel was beside me, and though I'd seen her strike home, her blade was buried to the hilt in my ribs. In shock my grip on the blade weakened, letting it pass between my hands. Defile Perilous cut me from shoulder to hip, and in gentle slow motion my body fell into two pieces.

Angel lost her mind. She landed and lunged, and Defile swept her weapon around to parry and kill as she should have done so easily now that she could focus all her attention on Angel. Yet the starmetal weapon twisted slowly, and cleft the air where Angel had been. With a crunch it bit into rock and stopped.

Defile Perilous looked down and saw Angel still. She saw the glorious hilt of the saber driven to her sternum, nestling between her breasts. Curiously she looked at her own weapon, wondering why it had failed her, and only then saw half my bloody body trailing the ornate handle. My arm had spasmed shut when the nerves connecting it to my spinal column had been severed. It had thrown her balance off just enough.

"I lost?" Defile Perilous asked, confused, before Angel swept her own weapon upwards, taking her head. An alchemical signal glittered on her forehead and began to fade.

Dog and Hail arrived as Angel turned to me. My blood had stopped gushing and now just trickled out. All that was left was my head, an arm, and about half my chest. With three friends clustered around me, I tried to smile as the last bits of strength faded from me. Life was good, I decided. Then I died.

The End


End file.
